Don't be mistaken by the flashy box art, Big Mutha Truckers won't blow you away with its not-so-superior graphics. Things have a sort of watered down Crazy Taxi look to them. There are a limited number of different vehicles on the road, and much of the landscape starts looking the same after a while. On the other hand, they do allow you to draw your own logo for your rig. Yee-haw.

While the game also includes its own radio stations, they are nowhere near the quality of those in games like GTA3. They're not really there to entertain, but more to capture the outback feeling of the game itself. Stations like MC Escher and K-Rok (get it? Krok...ok) are full of tongue-in-cheek humor about the less talked about parts of our great nation.

Big Mutha Truckers puts you in the driver's seat, literally, of an over-decorated, under-powered diesel truck. As one of four children of a matriarchal trucking tycoon who is near retirement, it is your task to accumulate more money than your siblings in two months so the company can be yours. Ideally, this would be as simple as transporting enough goods to make a killing, but in practice things are not so easy.

The first bad signal you get is from the shotgun-toting mother, which will give you a pretty good idea of the environment you will be spending the next 60 days in. The next omen of doom is her offspring. This rag-tag gang of four, any one of which you can control, looks as if they have been scraped off, forcefully mind you, from the bottom of the barrel.

You're lot in life, should you choose to accept it, is to make more money than your rival siblings in two months. This can be done in a number of ways. The region that Big Mutha Truckers takes place in is full of towns who buy and sell goods at dynamic prices. This method of income will be your main one, as you will get tips on which towns need what items and where these items are selling for cheap. There are also various alternative ways to supplement your financial holdings. When you are on the road between towns, other truckers will challenge you to races. The first one to the target town gets the cash, while the other one has to pay up. There are also slot machines in bars, loan sharks who would like nothing more than to give you money (for a price), and special missions you can take on (these are not easy).

The only problem here is that unless you get pretty lucky early on in the game, you're going to fall behind rather easily later on. Your only method of determining which goods to buy and where to bring them is based on rumors, so you may be carrying around a very expensive load a bug spray for a while before you can unload it for a profit.

Your passage between towns will not be as easy as staying in your lane. Quite the contrary, you will have to move out of your lane a number of times on your trips. The roads are a dangerous place, filled with outback nazi law-enforcement agencies, biker gangs who will jump onto your trailer and unhook it, and rival truckers.

Your defense against these antagonists will be upgrades for your truck. Things like better brakes and engines that consume less fuel will make your life easier on the road. You can also trade in your trailer for different ones to hold different types of cargo. These heavy lifters are expensive, and if you can't knock that biker off of your truck soon enough, your goods and your trailer are as good as gone.

Big Mutha Truckers may not have the best of bells and whistles, but it does offer a slightly non-linear gameplay structure. Things do get a little monotonous after a while though, and you'll really feel like you're living the life of a trucker on the road. It will give you a run for a while, just don't expect to be playing it a year from now.