Every once in a while I end up playing a game where I get so irked by it that I get an impulse to not even review it. Strangely enough, while it isn’t great to play unoptimized titles or those that border on being broken, it isn’t usually those that irritate me the most. Instead it’s games that work just fine, but are so devoid of any meaningful effort to justify why someone would spend their money, let alone their time on it at all. Truck Driving is the latest game that has now joined that list.

In principle, this didn’t have to be a terrible game, just a mediocre one. You’ll take control of a big truck, and over time you’ll have the opportunity to unlock two more aside from the default you start with. Your task isn’t difficult, you’ll simply want to drive it from point A to point B, covering what’s pretty well always a short and very basic track. Once you complete that stage, you’ll move onto the next, and so on.

Considering that once I’d cleared the first 10 levels everything continued to feel extremely basic and dull, I began to hope that they were somehow serving as a tutorial to get your feet wet, and that at some point you’d do anything at all remotely interesting. Nope, you won’t. Once you get enough coins you can unlock a different truck that functionally operates precisely the same way, but just looks a little different. Nothing to write home about there, the horn isn’t even different. I then saw the promise of driving at night that would be unlocked once I’d cleared the game’s first 25 levels. Perhaps that will make it feel like there’s something at the end of the wasting-my-time rainbow? Another fail, it turns out you’ll just repeat the first 25 levels but without as much light.

Let me be clear, this is a perfectly functional game, and I normally reserve my lowest scores for titles that are in some way broken. The thing is, I’ve played quite a number of indie titles that are in an unfortunate state, but at least show some heart and effort. This, instead, is a cynically slapped together collection of pretty well nothing of value. Even if it were free I would be telling you that your time is a precious resource, and not worth being wasted on even a moment of this unapologetic piece of shovelware nonsense. Its presence on the eShop only serves to harm everything else by perpetuating a perception that somehow all indie games are crappy cash grabs like this one.