Gunman Taco Truck

Reading John Romero’s biography Doom Guy: Life in First Person got me to return to one of the few games I’ve played but hadn’t finished. It’s Gunman Taco Truck, a game Romero made with his son, Donovan. It started off as just a coding lesson, but grew to a complete game in its own right. I think the core loop is a really good idea, but then it probably helped that both Donovan’s parents are game designers!

You’re this Mexican gunslinger who runs a taco truck… You’re trying to get through the wasteland to kill all the mutant animals, and once you do that, you finally get to the resisting safe bases. Every time you get to a resisting safe base, you get more money for selling tacos!

Donovan Romero-Brathwaite

The most important mechanic in the game is quickly serving tacos to survivors of the mutant apocalypse to make money. If you’re missing any ingredients, customers leave angrily and you can’t sell them any more tacos, which makes it important to have a stock of every ingredient. Whilst you have a virtual taco recipe book, I found it too time-consuming to use and you’re better off just looking at the graphic of the taco you’re shown. There’s a few tricky parts; I found cilantro and lettuce could be hard to distinguish.

The other part of the game is shooting monsters on the road with your taco truck. This is where I suspect the game has some influence from Romero’s work on Doom. There are exploding waste barrels much like Doom, and the bunnies you can shoot may be based on the infamous Daisy the rabbit. Romero’s gory sense of humour is part of the game as well. Even after you’ve killed them, you’re able to shoot at enemies even more and mince up their body-parts in a way that reminded me of playing the Brutal Doom mod. In the late game, there are even actual demons in addition to the mutants.

One detail I really liked is that you can get attacked by mutants even while your truck is parked at ‘safe’ bases. I thought that was rather ingenious. It keeps you on your toes and makes the world feel much less segregated and much more believable. It reminded me of being attacked in your ‘safe’ room in Silent Hill 4.

I have won the game now, so I feel qualified to review it. I think there are some balancing issues with the upgrade items. I found that upgrading your truck was so useful that I’d feel bad buying any of the short-term items like repairs, particularly because the upgrade also gives you a new, fully-repaired truck. Late in the game I normally found that I had plenty of money to travel around with and buy taco ingredients, but maybe that’s part of the fun of breaking the game’s economy. I also started playing the game on its mobile version where you can break the economy almost immediately just by watching incentivised videos in the game. If you want the true untampered ‘survival’ experience, I recommend the Steam version instead.

The game is a kind of rogue-like where you go back to the beginning of the game if you die, and death can come suddenly if you venture into new areas unprepared. Personally, I think the stakes may be too high. If I died, my first thought was how many more tacos I’d have to make to get back to where I was. Having such a harsh survival mechanic can be fine so long as you survive but easily be annoying if you don’t.

Perhaps my biggest issue was that Gunman Taco Truck can hurt your hand from clicking too much! A lot of things in the game, like making tacos, buying ingredients, and picking up resources on the road all take a lot of clicking and dragging. You may find you need to give your hand a rest after a while of playing the game. I use computers all the time but I still found that all the clicking was hard work.

The game can also be buggy at times. I got a black screen and a soft lock at one point. I also found that pausing during a mutant attack in the ‘safe’ zones doesn’t pause the attack, and my truck was destroyed with the pause menu still open. It’s not a shoddy game by any means, but it’s clear that Gunman Taco Truck was primarily a coding lesson and not intended to be a huge project.

Also, a word of warning: the first time I got near the final destination of Winnipeg I thought I’d won, but got killed by the final boss. Learn from my example and come prepared with armour and all the missiles you can as you approach the end of the game, you’ll need them!

Some aspects of the game may have influenced my own design for my own game, Super Space Galaxy. My game likewise has a fuel mechanic as you go from one solar system to the next. Super Space Galaxy isn’t as strict as Gunman Taco Truck about this, but I still have some sense of continuity in your fuel and cargo as you explore the map. I think it may have also influenced my food choices since it’s hard not to think of food when you play this game. Did I buy red onions because of Gunman Taco Truck? We may never know.

John Romero is something of a hero to me, and I’ve now read the story of the production of Doom in two different books. I hope to take some of what went right there and use it for my own future games. Gunman Taco Truck isn’t perfect, but it’s clear that Romero and his son made it with care and a pride in his Mexican heritage. The taco-making is solid and the core loop works very well. If you’re interested in an unusual game that’s made with love, you may want to try Gunman Taco Truck.

Thanks for reading,

Kenneth Dunlop