Expeditions: A MudRunner Game Review (PS5) | Push Square

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If you've ever looked at a stretch of abandoned road, overcome with mud and muck, and wondered whether your little two-door compact could make it through, MudRunner might be a series you already know. From Spintires to SnowRunner, it's a lovely little franchise that seems to be surviving capably, and its latest is Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, which takes the series in an altogether more scientific direction. Now, your vehicle rescues and arduous mountain climbs have a more intellectual mission briefing before them — but the core gameplay hasn't changed too much.

Expeditions sets you up with a quick staging area in Colorado to begin with, getting you back up to speed pretty rapidly. You'll learn or re-learn the basics of shifting into low gears, lowering your tyre pressure, engaging a differential lock, and ploughing into extremely ill-advised crags, canyons, and swamps. These tools become your bread and butter, and soon enough you'll be using them like muscle memory, turning them on when needed and then back off to save fuel. All of this is with the goal of getting to that next staging post and figuring out the route to whatever comes after that.

From Colorado, you'll then get access to Nevada's Grand Canyon area and a wooded, lush slice of the Carpathian mountains. This rounds out the three open-world maps the game ships with, and each of the latter two offers up a whole host of, well, expeditions to work through, along with open-world exploration if you like.

Unsurprisingly, these missions start out simple for the most part (get up this hill, check out that part of the map, use your drone a bit), but it doesn't take long for things to become more interesting. The moment you're first tasked with towing out a stranded vehicle, you'll feel how Expeditions' physics systems rise to the task.

After all, the real core of the MudRunner series is very much its physics; the bounce and settle of your suspension, the way your car's frame flexes, and above all the way mud