Expeditions: A MudRunner Game Review

ign.com:

MudRunner and SnowRunner may share the word we apply to humans and animals moving as quickly as they physically can but, rest assured, nothing about this series is rapid. That is, if you do find yourself moving particularly fast in these excellent, deliberately slow-paced, sandbox-style off-road driving simulators, there’s a strong chance it’s only because you’re tumbling down a mountainside.

Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is no different in this regard; it’s all about trundling over the terrain at turtle speeds. Victory is earned by staying upright and clawing your way through punishing environments that want nothing more than to tug your trucks deep into the ground – or topple them over. Where Expeditions is different is in the more untamed maps, and its mission design – which is now less about hauling goods and more about exploring the woods, so to speak. The good news is that Expeditions is a satisfying and worthwhile twist on the MudRunner/SnowRunner experience, even if mission objectives can get a little formulaic and frustratingly gated at times.

Again, while the core of both MudRunner and SnowRunner is really the challenge of moving bulky cargo and building materials down the sorts of muddy roads that would give a hippopotamus a hernia, Expeditions is a bit of a sidestep. For one, in terms of roads, there really aren’t any. Expeditions’ great looking environments – Colorado, Arizona, and Central Europe’s Carpathian Mountains – are basically just slabs of total wilderness. Rocky deserts, soggy gulches, dense forest, muddy rivers; it’s a nice spectrum. There are occasional signs of civilisation – say, perhaps some camping equipment, or a ferry, or a dilapidated bridge there to remind us that we haven’t been hurled back in time – but essentially Expeditions simply plonks us in the middle of nowhere.

That, in turn, informs the mission design. Sure, the vehicles feel the same as they have in the series to date as they wallow and churn through the physics-based,