And that’s just on casual mode for the truly insane, who’ve been driven mad by the solitude of Spintires’ curiously pedestrian-free maps, there’s hardcore mode. Spintires: MudRunner‘s physics are convincing enough that when your truck takes a tumble, you know there’s no-one to blame but yourself. Those aren’t words you’d normally associate with a game about off-road trucking but when you’re driving up a muddy slope you’ll be holding your breath every time your truck teeters even slightly. Yes, you could have respawned and started again, but you have a reputation to uphold, dammit!Īnd by God, Spintires: MudRunner can be tense. The more time you put into Spintires: MudRunner, the more it draws you in to the point where you’ll be willing to spend an hour slowly inching your way through a mud field just for the sense of accomplishment you get from finally delivering your load. Tweaking your vehicle is also an option and while these routines may sound onerous, they make you all the more invested in your endeavour. Glancing at the map is also a sound strategy since you’ll need to determine an appropriate route to take, though even the “roads” marked on the map can turn out to be little more than soggy dirt tracks.
![ps4 mudrunner 2 ps4 mudrunner 2](https://www.maniac.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/spintires-mudrunner.jpg)
So if you’re tasked with hauling eight logs to a lumber mill you’ll first have to decide whether you’re going to use your lorry as is or attach a trailer, knowing that the latter will be more likely to tip over. Spintires: MudRunner is almost the polar opposite of Grand Theft Auto, rewarding patience and consideration. Attempt to use your vehicle’s winch to extricate yourself from a mire and the tree you’re anchored to will bend and potentially break.īut while getting hopelessly and utterly stuck might be visually impressive, your actual objective is to transport loads from one location to another. Cross a river and your wheels will churn the water in an suitably realistic manner. Individual chunks of mud, rather than mere textures, cling to your tyres as you push onwards, leaving furrows in your wake. There’s certainly a striking contrast between Spintires: MudRunner’s beautiful, if damp, landscapes and the muddy mayhem that ensues when you try to traverse them. Spintires will let you, should you so choose, plough across fields and through rivers which, thanks to the game’s attention to detail, is a superb spectacle. And every time you play, you’ll inch ever closer to mastery of the game’s Soviet-era machines. Each misstep will teach you a little more about Spintires: MudRunner’s mechanics. You can probably see a pattern forming here, yet each failure is a learning experience. Things were going well, right up until the point I attempted to cross a small wooden bridge in the vast vehicle and plummeted into the river. Undeterred, I recalled the stricken jeep and and leapt (or rather teleported, since there’s no on-foot travel in Spintires) into the cab of a sturdier vehicle, a lorry of some description, and set forth once again. Mere minutes later, it was laying on its roof by a riverbank, taking on water as I laughed like an idiot at my incompetence. Finding myself at the wheel of a jeep, my initial instinct was to take it off-road and head into the muddy wilderness. My first few forays into Spintires: MudRunner, the latest incarnation of this off-road driving game, were pure, glorious chaos.
![ps4 mudrunner 2 ps4 mudrunner 2](https://www.maniac.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/spintires-mudrunner-696x392.jpg)
Not because it has a total lack of horrifying, Lovecraftian monstrosities, but because, unlike Dark Souls, failing at Spintires is actually entertaining. I would, however, take issue with this comparison. Spintires is, according to some, the “Dark Souls” of driving games.