MudRunner: American Wilds

Genre: Driving Simulation

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Online)

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Review:

MudRunner is a Simulation game that has you driving 30 real-life trucks and off-road vehicles. Just to be clear, this is not a racing game, but an attempt to recreate the feeling of driving these large and at times unwieldy vehicles in harsh environments.

The tasks you’ll be taking on in this game generally involve hauling things from one place to another, which may sound repetitive but it’s usually not so simple. Simply traversing the environment in this game is a nerve-wracking chore, with uneven, muddy terrain often making it difficult to steer in a straight line or even gain purchase on some hills. Simply getting from point A to point B is a huge challenge in itself, and on top of that you need to manage multiple vehicles as well as loading them with the right equipment for the job.

One of the things this game does pretty well is its graphics – mud in this game looks fantastic, and reacts realistically as you drive through it, not just adding a new tire track but actually moving and shifting as you drive through it. What’s more, this mud actually collects on your tires and can be washed off when driving through puddles or streams, and this has a noticeable effect on your vehicle’s performance. It’s just a pity that some textures in the game don’t hold up to the rest of the experience (in particular, the textures for logs were really blurry), and also the game in general has a washed-out look that’s kinda’ ugly (though you can address this somewhat by adjusting brightness and contrast setting in menus).

One of the biggest frustrations I had with this game are the controls. This is one of those driving games where pressing left doesn’t make you turn left so much as it turns the steering wheel more to the left. It’s understandable, given that much of what you’ll be doing will require precision steering to maneuver correctly, but it means that the simple act of driving forward will undoubtedly involve multiple adjustments to steering to accommodate slight turns, and then multiple adjustments afterward to try to bring things back to neutral and deal with overcompensating.

What’s more, while I have a lot of respect for those who have to maneuver vehicles in harsh terrain like this, I am highly skeptical that it is this difficult to do so. At one point I arrived at a destination with a trailer in tow and simply had to park it, and the simple act of parking took me a half hour. Between maneuvering the unwieldy thing into position and the refusal of my vehicle to get traction on the mud, I simply could not get the thing angled correctly… and I should mention, this happened in one of the game’s tutorials.

I should mention that this game includes all of the content from both the original MudRunners game as well as the content from the American Wilds expansion, which included multiple new vehicles and two new American-inspired maps.

In the end, I respect MudRunner for how dedicated it is to delivering a simulation that mirrors how difficult it can be to move trucks through muddy terrain, but as much as I respect it for what it is, I did not have fun with this game. I’m impressed by its visual presentation, its attention to detail, and I am sure that there are people out there who will absolutely love this game. I am not one of those people.

tl;dr – MudRunner: American Wilds is a Driving Simulation that has you driving multiple real-life vehicles to deliver hauls in rugged environments. It is a game that does an amazing job simulating the difficulty of driving in the wild, and a lot of the graphical touches are phenomenal, but between the awkward controls and the frustrating difficulty, this is a game that’s going to have a very narrow appeal.

Grade: C+

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