You can choose between casual and hardcore mode, although ‘casual’ will be hardcore enough for most people. Rocks are kicked into the air by your tires, saplings bend when you rumble over them, and water froths as you ford rivers and carve through puddles. They all feel like real machines, with trailers that bounce and rattle as you trundle over uneven ground. You’ll hear your engine heave and groan as you tackle a steep incline or muddy patch, its exhausts belching black smoke as it struggles to escape the sticky gunk. The physics are excellent, creating a nice distinction between the big rigs and the smaller trucks. As you chew through the mud, the vehicles feel genuinely heavy and unwieldy.
The muted colour palette, bleak overcast skies, and ageing Soviet machinery remind me of the STALKER games-as does the feeling of being constantly at war with your environment. There are trucks with articulated trailers, and big chunky ones that look like they’ve been rusting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for the last thirty years. They can cut through forests and wave between trees, allowing them to uncover the ‘fog of war’ that initially obscures the map and reveal wider roads and trails for your big haulers to squeeze through. Your garage is filled with an array of vehicles to plough through the mud in, including nimble jeeps that are good for scouting the area ahead. You learn that the big trucks can often brute force across anything with a head of steam. I don’t pretend to understand much of the underlying math and science, but I intuitively know the peril of driving certain kinds of trucks over certain patches of road.
Deformable terrain, traction physics, truck weight, torque, yadda yadda yadda. Superlative exploration aside, what makes this game work is the basic interaction of tires with the ground. Let’s see, on the map, it looks like this leads to, uh, someplace I haven’t explored, so I have no idea. Oh, wait, I’ve been driving along some sort of wash or gully and someplace where there aren’t any trees for whatever reason. Spintires is about roads that sometimes aren’t even roads.
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