It feels satisfying to successfully get yourself out of a doomed situation and accomplish your goal, but it’s also painful to have to abandon your task when there isn’t anything to winch on to. Every area has certain places you can shoot a hook on to and either try to drive the car towards it with your engine power or pull yourself with it. You’re going to be relying on your truck’s winch an awful lot to try and avoid these. You can also deploy another truck to pull you out or refuel you, however, but that’s only worth it in specific circumstances. You can be mere feet from your goal only to have to send your truck back to the garage because you couldn’t move or you ran out of gas. You’re going to fall into the water sometimes. While you’re driving, you’re going to get stuck in the mud. To get anywhere else, you’re going to have to drive. The garage in each map is the only place you can jump to. You can fast travel, but don’t take that to mean you can just hop around as you see fit. Simply put, SnowRunner doesn’t mess around. If you haven’t played the previous game in the series, though, don’t expect it to be quite the same as something like American Truck Simulator. It’s easy to dump hour after hour into the game. Any truck or part you purchase for cash can be sold back for exactly what you paid for it, making it painless to get new stuff whenever you see fit.Īll of this builds to a compelling gameplay loop that consists of exploring maps, opening up connecting pathways, completing missions, and getting better trucks. Shortly afterward, you find your first garage and get a heavy-duty truck that you’ll be using for the early portion of the game. When SnowRunner begins, you only have a small pickup that can just be used for scouting around, but then you gain access to a highway truck capable of hauling cargo. Collecting experience allows you to rank up, which grants you access to more purchasable trucks and customizable parts you can buy.
Successful completion of any contract or task rewards you with both money and experience. Contracts tend to have multiple such requirements. They typically have you go to pick up cargo at warehouses, mills, and farms and then deliver them. Each of the three overall areas has a list of these that you’ll need to complete in order, which then unlocks more. SnowRunner‘s principal focus is on contracts, though. Many of these just want you to deliver materials to designated areas, but some will require you to collect a drowned truck or stuck trailer and bring it back to the owner. These count as tasks, as do any of the quests you can pick up out in the world. But there are bridges to fix and rockslides to clear, which open new pathways that allow you to get around faster.
You’ll often have to navigate dangerous pathways that are slow-going. When you first start exploring a map, it’ll be fairly closed off. The maps start with your needing to locate a garage that will allow you to fast travel, which will come in handy as you’ll end up warping your truck back when you get completely stuck. Finding the watchtowers does highlight the particulars that dot the map, such as the game’s many tasks, upgrades, trailers, and acquirable vehicles. But you don’t even need to go to these if you don’t want to, as the map fills in wherever you go. Įach of the 11 maps in SnowRunner has watchtowers that you need to drive to so that you can unlock part of the map. In fact, the game has so much content that it’s almost stupid. The maps are all huge and detailed, with surprisingly memorable locations that you’ll end up learning as you play. Michigan and Alaska each have four zones that are connected, while Taymyr has three. The game takes place in Michigan, Alaska, and Taymyr, Russia, so there’s a lot of variety in maps and locations. SnowRunner is the follow-up to the similarly named MudRunner. It’s not for everybody, but for anyone with a penchant for methodical vehicular traversal and scrutinizing realistic terrain, there’s a lot to like here. But after getting accustomed to the game and figuring out how everything worked, I too started to enjoy the thrill of driving very slowly while navigating natural hazards. The first several hours I played SnowRunner, I was not one of those people.
As the Spintires series has shown, some people like games where you get stuck in the mud and have to carefully navigate treacherous areas in huge trucks or risk giant problems.