The visuals are uniquely ambitious and that ambition pays off, particularly as it appears to all be so very well optimised. A still image of the game cannot do justice to just how naturally things responds to contact, from the mesmeric way that water flows over tyres as you ford bodies of water to how the mud shifts and sticks under the weight of a loaded truck. The serene Siberian forests with their babbling brooks and tranquil glades look almost idyllic at first, but the visuals of Spintires are less about what things look like and more about how they move and respond, as many of the terrain features will react badly to having a colossal Russian lorry rumble through them. The maps are the antagonists of Spintires. ![]() Each of the vehicles handle quite differently from the others, the powerful eight wheelers can roll through almost any amount of mud for example, while the UAZ (think Russian jeep) has to take advantage of its ability to travel off the beaten path in order to avoid getting absorbed into the gloop. In spite of or even because of all this ungainliness the vehicles are huge fun to drive, skidding over what little tarmac can be found, accidentally squashing saplings and chewing up the ground like farm machines. Their animations and textures are exquisitely detailed, capturing the instability of the vehicles with their high centres of gravity and huge squashy tyres as well as their propensity to get covered in muck. The trucks themselves are monstrous clanking, rattling beasts, belching out great gouts of exhaust fumes as they grumble through mud, foliage and water like dieselpunk dinosaurs. ![]() This game is the Dark Souls of driving games.ĭriving in Spintires is an inelegant process that takes a lot of getting used to, particularly as the camera controls can be frustrating. On paper this seems easy enough, and it would be if the game took place in a car park, however the maps of Spintires are absolutely brutal. Also much of the map is blacked out and must be revealed by locating things called cloaks that reveal areas of the map when removed. The trucks that you start with may not be fit for the task and so you might have to find and recover other trucks out in the world in order to do the job. The aim of the game is to start from your garage, collect logs from a lumber yard and take them to the sawmills. On each level you have garages, lumber yards, refuelling stations and sawmills. The premise of a game of Spintires is simple enough. In an industry where developers will spend fortunes designing this year’s variation on the grizzled male protagonist in order to achieve optimal penetration of the key demographic it is a pleasure to find a game that has been designed to be played rather than sold. It may also be, for nostalgia reasons, gripped and sorted. Hidden beneath a deceptively simple concept, driving big trucks through big mud, lurks a game that is at times challenging, dramatic, spectacular and even funny. Spintires is the sort of game that more games should strive to be.
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