Recent reviews by AzrielForReal

You know some tycoon games make you feel like you're doing something important? This game doesn't do that. Also the devs are gone, so no updates. Look for reviews from the last year for an idea of the current game's state; it isn't finished, they just don't care.

Looks like an interesting resource management game, it actually thinly-veiled propoganda masquerading as a noir story, which itself is masquerading as a game. Nothing you do matters, yet you can constantly lose by doing the most ordinary things. That's fine, Papers Please did that, and it was pretty good. Note that in Papers Please, you only go back one day, and the gameplay is very very simple. Here, your win conditions for events are so arbitrary that doing anything is a failure, there's incredibly long and drawn out badly-narrated cutscenes that you can skip (but if you do, then there's no point to the 'game'), and then when you inevitably go back to try again you end up more frustrated because literally everything that the game tells you is a choice, is actually just pre-scripted nonsense.

You can tell there was an attempt to be realistic, and to provide some sort of political and/or social commentary, but it just completely fails to actually say anything other than what might as well be "Nothing matters, kill yourself." I'm not even trying to be edgy here, this game takes the RNG from Tharsis and combines it with the cyncism of Papers Please, and then vacuum seals out all of the fun, choice, or reward. I'd actually recommend you try just a single hour of this game to experience how insanely depressing it is, but also to experience the apex of horrendous voice acting. Immediately refund, of course, unless you're a masochist, in which case I'm glad you've finally found the perfect game.

I couldn't make it through the first month of the game, I might find myself going back since I have nothing to lose having spent three and a half hours on it already. To be fair to the game, it has decent graphics (though I hate minimalist art styles) and sound, and I can appreciate what they were trying to do to with the gameplay and story, but it just isn't compelling enough to sell the concept. There's absolutely nothing to lighten up the mood, so you get so burnt out on all the cartoonishly dark rubbish going on that you end up feeling like you shouldn't even care, and that's why I stopped playing.

EDIT: Game has been completely abandoned in favor of a "sequel" named Snowrunner, which has the bare minimum of new content because it exists solely to get Epic Games' money. Game breaking bugs were never fixed. New content was never added. That seems to be the M.O. with the developer 'Pavel' you might hear about. In the meantime, the game you want to buy is the original Spintires, which is being maintained and updated with new content all the time now.


Initial impressions are that this is worth getting whether you're new to the game or coming from the original Spintires. Other reviews have already summed up what's good and bad with the game, so I'll focus on what's different from the original. Mudrunner doesn't offer much more than some tweaks, a new internal camera option, and a promise of future content, but while the original Spintires was plagued with an inexperienced and stubborn publisher, this version has more going for it. I'll update this review as things go on.

Hopefully we'll get new maps and vehicles with updates, and hopefully better mod tools will come out. The problem with the old Spintires is that there was no official way to make modded maps, which is something that I think would add hundreds of hours to the game's enjoyment since having only six is very limiting.

One important thing to note is that unlike the original Spintires, this one has a progression system. You have to unlock things by playing the maps, which means you have to experience the new content first before you get to use the old goodies. I kind of like that, but I can see that rubbing people the wrong way. The problem with the vehicle options is that there's about eight trucks that're all identical to one another except for their tires or having differential lock or not. The old game just let you swap out tires on trucks, this one doesn't seem to let you do that. I prefer the old system, because I'd rather have three trucks on a map with options for them rather than nine trucks that're mostly useless and two that I can do things with because of their tires not being garbage. That's really my biggest complaint so far, unless I wanted to complain about spending $12. I'll complain about the money if I don't see any updates in the next couple of months.

This game is great, you can read other reviews to hear why. I fully recommend this game, with a few notes to mention as caution:

- The physics can be frustrating, especially in workshop maps.
- The game's performance can vary dramatically from one map to the next, or just from one part of a map to another. This is worst on the highest settings, and on lower graphics settings it's still perfectly smooth, but it's worth mentioning.
- There aren't as many workshop maps as you might expect, and they come in varying quality. I'd say there's at least a good 20 maps that are done very well, and seeing as the game's been out for over two years (as of writing this review) you can safely say there won't be new maps coming that fast. 18 base maps, plus 20-35 workshop maps, that's pretty good for a game like this.
- Development is pretty much finished, what you see is what you get. If you like this as-is, great. If you think it's missing something, wait for a sale, because you likely won't see whatever it is added.

All those cautions aside, like I said, I do recommend this game. It's one of those games you can keep coming back to, especially if you have some friends to play multiplayer with. Just watch out for those lag spikes when all those shell casings go flying out of the waste bin... but then again, isn't that part of the fun?

The best way to play tabletop games.

EDIT 2: Game delisted.

EDIT: This game is now being kept updated, while the alleged updated rerelease "Mudrunner" (now abandoned in favor of an Epic exclusive "Snowrunner" which has bare minimum improvements) is bugged and gimped. Between the two (three?) this is the version you want. Past review reflects the state of the game before the development reorganization.


What VERY LITTLE of a game that exists here is fun, but the developer and the publisher are scumbags. They do not care about their players at all, and overcharge for a game that currently is nothing more than two trucks with ten reskins, and a half dozen tiny maps that are just the same three different types of terrain repeated until you're sick of it.

Mods are THE ONLY thing keeping this game fun, and the publishers are deliberately making it extremely hard to mod the game. They promised Workshop support a year ago, nothing.

In fact, they promised more maps, more trucks, less glitches, and better gameplay over a year ago. Nothing. Actually, they removed a map, made three of the reskinned trucks worthless, and made the gameplay worse. They also added bugs and glitches, and refuse to fix them.

Do not buy unless it's at least 75% off. This game is barely worth $10 as it stands. Also, don't expect to have much fun with friends, the multiplayer is nearly unplayable and there ARE NO SAVES. If anyone's internet even hiccups, you have to start over from the beginning.