Toll Booth Simulator Review

Toll Booth Simulator is uh, well, you can probably tell from the title alone. Developed by SifDev (a solo dev) and published by Ultimate Publishing, Ultimate Games S.A., and PlayWay S.A., I decided to give this game a shot after seeing the trailer on the Steam page, being quite the fan of Papers, Please, and saw that it was sitting at a Positive score… when I initially kind of wrote it off as just another not-too-serious simulator. So, will it be worth working off a crippling debt for years to come, or will I rather risk going to prison?

You play as a criminal who has just been caught trying to escape. However, instead of throwing you into another cell, the law enforcement decided to saddle you with a debt and a job as a toll booth operator in the middle of the desert (is that even legal?). Now $999,999 in the hole, you’ll need to earn your freedom at any cost, one passing car at a time.

Despite the oppressive setup, the game is a lot more goofy in tone. There are a comical amount of skeletons littered throughout the desert and even your home, aliens are used quite frequently for a couple of game mechanics, and denying entry to people will have them make a funny quip before they are abducted to parts unknown. I didn’t consider it the most chuckle-worthy, but I did like the weirdness the game wasn’t afraid to indulge in.

From... okay, I gotta be honest, this place sucks.

As for the graphics, they’re fine if a little uninspired. The map mostly consists of a desert with a bunch of NPCs either driving down the road or wandering around the small town near the toll booths. It’s cartoony without much detail, and ragdolls can be quite funny to see. It’s not bad, but I get this feeling that I've seen this style before…

But enough about that, let’s get working! Upon starting a new game, your first source of income is to run the toll booth, which is pretty easy to do. Just keep the gate closed, which will cause drivers to stop and hand over their passports. All you have to do is check if everything is in order before deciding whether or not they can pass. Getting it wrong will incur a cash penalty, but it doesn’t tell you what you got wrong, which can feel a little frustrating. I found out very quickly that cars will run through the gate if you keep it open. There isn’t a punishment or anything; you just lose out on some cash. Actually, they’re polite enough to wait until I come back from doing other stuff, which led to serious traffic jams.

What? How did you even...?

However, I have a big issue with the toll booth operation. As you progress, more rules are added to make things more complicated, as expected. Unfortunately, they stopped adding them after the seventh one. All you need to worry about is if they’re carrying contraband (in their car or up their butts), their passport is right, and if they have a driver’s license, which isn’t too hard to figure out. Heck, I can speedrun checks because as soon as I find something wrong, I just hit Deny because there’s no bonus for finding other discrepancies or anything.

Soon enough, though, you can ignore the toll booth altogether by hiring workers to do it for you. They’re not as fast, but when you’re out doing errands, they’re constantly making money and do all their checks perfectly. In all, after maybe three hours of gameplay, you don’t have to run the toll booth in a game called Toll Booth Simulator! You wanna know where the real money is? Farming, mixing mocktails, and robbing people.

Disrupting traffic to make money.

Let’s talk about farming first. You can cultivate crops either in your trailer or at the big farm just across the desert. All you have to do is plant the seeds, water them, and then wait until they’re ready to harvest. It’s not the most complicated system, but there’s no way to automate the process. No workers you can hire, no sprinklers to water the plants for you; it’s just you and whatever farming equipment you purchased. It’s a pretty time-consuming process, which only got worse as I expanded my farm. However, it was necessary if I wanted to make even more cash.

After you’ve collected your ingredients, it’s time to mix them up and create mocktails out of them. All you need to do is head to some mixing machines, put in the fruit, and then hit start, and you’ll have a nice and fruity drink in no time. All the recipes are available from your in-game phone through an app, but it doesn’t tell you how much their base price is. Also, there are only two mixing machines in the game, so making mass quantities was a long and boring process since I had to manually add ingredients and hit Start to make them.

Wait, I thought this a toll booth sim.

Once you do have all your drinks made, it’s time to sell them! Just head over into town and talk to people with the drink out, whether they’re on the street or at home. These drinks are seriously overpriced, as a random mix without specific ingredients is $70 at minimum, and you can totally make people pay more if you’re willing to take your chances. It feels like I’m dealing drugs to people, like in Schedule I. Heck, even their eyes are pretty similar now that I think about it… except, again, there’s no way to automate or subsidise the process.

You have to manually go up to every single person to sell your drinks. Eventually, I just realised I only needed to make the priciest mocktail available since everyone would drink whatever, and just focused on farming two specific crops. It certainly made inventory management easier to deal with…

Man, farming is annoying...

But that might not be enough. Maybe you need a little more cash to pay your debts, and you’re willing to risk your parole. If you’re quick and sneaky, you can break into homes and steal their valuables, which you can then take to a fence to sell. However, you can be caught if the residents are home and you manage to spook them.

Don’t worry, though, as you can request an investigation from a shady app that will tell you when a home is vacant, allowing you to waltz on in and take everything that isn’t nailed down. There isn’t much of a downside to using the app other than a 40-minute cooldown, which isn’t that bad considering how long it takes to make money legitimately, and you can find some seriously valuable stuff. The first house I broke into had a gold crown! That’s a little OP.

Ignore the bodies, it's for a good reason.

Of course, though, you can get in trouble with the cops by getting caught while robbing people, or just by attacking people out of nowhere. However, these cops are not good at their job. As when I first got their attention… nothing happened, so I went about my business without a second thought. When I did need to run away, I easily outpaced them by getting into the worst car I had and drove since they were on foot. I waited until the big “WANTED” indicator was gone, and it was business as usual. And when I did get caught, just to see what would happen, I only got fined $150, when you can easily earn thousands with the right drink or by grabbing a bundle of cash. They don’t even confiscate your inventory. You’re just dumped in front of the police station with your car waiting. It’s not that much of a punishment.

Speaking of, inventory management just isn’t great here. First off, it’s a physical bag you have to keep in your hotbar. I was seriously afraid that I’d hit the Drop Item key and lose it. Secondly, there’s no way to sort your inventory, which makes organising a chore. It wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t for the fact that stacking items is extremely inconsistent. Seriously, sometimes it would let me put together items, but most of the time it doesn’t. This could be my mistake, but I seriously doubt that it is.

This is all the drink mixers you get.

Ah, but all work and no play is no way to live. If you’re going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, you might as well do it with a girlfriend. There is an option to find a date, but sadly, it’s a largely pointless mechanic. The deepest your relationship will go is that you’ll give your girlfriend flowers, jewellery, and food. In exchange, she’ll… follow you around and spawn along with the car when you get out of the police station. I have to admit, I expected a little more. Help me make drinks or farm, I have to do all that manually with no workers!

And that’s the entire game, from start to finish. After the tutorial quests, there’s nothing more to do than work off that million-dollar debt, and once I hired some workers to manage the toll booths, it’s only a matter of when it happens. Seriously, after nine in-game days (or five hours), I considered myself set for the rest of the playthrough (helped by the fact I got the best car in the game for free via DLC). Paying off your debt isn’t too bad either, to be honest. No demands for payments every week or so, just pay it off when you can at no interest. That’s Tom Nook– levels of debt kindness right there! If you ignore the red number on the top right of the screen, there isn’t much to motivate you to clear it. 

H-How...?

Onto my other issues with the game. Though Toll Booth Simulator ran fairly consistently at 60 FPS, I think the initial load time when loading up your save can be a little long. There weren’t any glitches either, apart from goofy ragdoll physics. Other than that, whatever issues you have with the game would likely be with the game design itself.

Despite my issues with Toll Booth Simulator, I still had a decent time. It is satisfying to work the toll booth, mix drinks, and rob houses clean of their stuff, but it just gets old fairly quickly. There isn’t a lot to this game, and once you’ve gotten yourself settled, it’s inevitable that you’ll clear the debt rather than it being a looming threat. It’s a fine game (if you like farming and selling products), but not something I’d go out of my way to play in my off time.

Party the night away, forgetting your crippling debt.

In conclusion, Toll Booth Simulator isn’t really a toll booth simulator after the first few hours. It’s a farming game that lets you rob houses.