


The biggest disappointment is that the handling of the small, lighter scout vehicles – like SUVs and utes – isn’t great.
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It’s a fine enough way to reward progress through an arcade racer, for instance, but it makes little sense in a straight-laced, all-terrain delivery simulator to arbitrarily prevent you from buying off-road tyres you could otherwise afford. Cash can also be injected into upgrades for your trucks, but it seems a bit daft that certain, utilitarian upgrades are locked until you hit the required level. There are, however, decent trucks hidden on the maps already, and I focused on finding them to add to my garage rather than buying new ones as the payouts are a little stingy and standard missions can’t be replayed for more credits (though there are certain timed delivery challenges that can be repeated). Unsurprisingly, completing objectives earns cash for brand-new, better trucks more suited to taming the harsh maps. You either have to go to your task lists – of which there are multiple – find the mission manually, and activate it from there, or activate the mission itself from the destination before it lets you drop it off.

I do, however, find it pretty annoying the objective system isn’t intuitive enough to automatically prompt a change in mission if you veer off from a planned route to, say, tug a missing trailer from a swamp and return it to its owner.
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Considering how long it can take to negotiate a single, slippery hill with a full load, there are dozens and dozens of hours of trucking time here. Outside of delivery work there are stranded trailers to return, drowned and broken trucks to rescue, and other odd jobs to complete. A fallen bridge may need steel and timber to be rebuilt, while a local facility may be after food or fuel. There’s also a vast assortment of new cargo types, which are weaved into the context of more varied objectives. They’re larger than the maps in MudRunner, so there’s much more ground to cover. SnowRunner sets you and your trucks loose in an array of distinct environments, from muddy Michigan to snap-frozen Alaska and, finally, Taymyr in Russia. Bound by the same heavy-handling dynamics and physics-based, deformable ground materials that have underpinned its predecessors – MudRunner and Spintires – SnowRunner is punishing and sometimes merciless, but rarely outright unfair. And that’s easy to do! Mud will suck trucks into the ground, deep water will knock out engines, and steep grades will roll semis sideways. Failure is the result of underestimating an obstacle, hurrying too much, or biting off more than you can chew. Success means you brought the right tool for the job, managed your fuel, and picked an appropriate route. Unlike most games infamous for their immense difficulty, however, doing well in SnowRunner is less a matter of your lightning-quick reflexes and more a test of your patience and decision-making skills. There’s a lot more to SnowRunner than just lugging cargo from Anytown, USA to what feels like the arse-end of the Earth.
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This game is admirably unafraid to make you earn every literal inch of progression through its waterlogged swamps, muddy bogs, and snow-covered trails, although it’s slightly let down by an occasionally aggravating chase camera, illogical upgrade hurdles, and some unnecessarily finicky menu shuffling. SnowRunner’s brand of harsh difficulty is a uniquely slow paced but infectiously rewarding blend: it’s a sandbox-style trucking simulator where the enemy isn’t time, it’s the harsh and hostile terrain. Some test your reflexes and timing, some test your tactical smarts, and others try your patience. There are a bunch of different kinds of difficulty in games.
