Spintires follow-up SnowRunner defrosts in time for an April release
Turn up the AC
Winter might be wrapping up, but it's never too late for an out-of-season blizzard. SnowRunner, arctic follow-up to ponderous mud-crawler Spintires: Mudrunner is bringing the chill back to PC on April 28th. With bigger landscapes, wetter roads and colder bottoms, SnowRunner dares you to turn off the in-car air conditioning and wrap up warm for some slow and steady ice road truckin'.
Developers Saber Interactive revealed the start of SnowRunner's debut haul with a new trailer this morning. Don't be fooled by all that green - the mercury drops fast and hard. Packed your snowshoes?
SnowRunner is its chilly follow-up to Spintires: MudRunner - a meticulously detailed off-road simulation where making good time took second place to making it through boggy trails in the first place. MudRunner was itself an expanded rerelease of the game known simply as Spintires. It's a game where, as per (departed RPS-er) Adam Smith's Spintires review, progress is "measured by inches of control rather than miles per hour".
With SnowRunner, current developers Saber Interactive have slapped some snow chains on MudRunner's tyres, sprucing up the physics engine and terrain simulation for an arctic road trip - one where the pace isn't the only thing that's glacial. Wet mud's dangerous enough, but snow and ice? That's downright lethal. Thankfully, SnowRunner is prepared, offering up a warehouse packed with intake snorkels, chain tires, floodlights and the like to help you carve a glacial trail across Russia and the USA.
I can't drive, but I know too well how much of a nightmare it is pulling a hulking metal carcass through a snowdrift. Training sled-dogs in the Norwegian woods way back, we'd take the team out with the truck instead of a sledge when the snow wasn't deep enough - easing along on the accelerator to help 15 Greenland dogs haul a Ford Transit along nordic trails.
SnowRunner churns its way to the Epic Games Store for £35/$40 on April 28.
The company who still own the original Spintires recently resumed development, releasing a new expansion trucking through Chernobyl. That was a bit of a surprise because their public falling-out with the creator of Spintires seemed to have been a large impetus for another publisher to come along and get the game rolling again with MudRunner.