HomeReviewsExpeditions: A MudRunner Game
Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game review: the dirt’s as good as ever, but the science is a bit too cleanScree-ing holiday
Scree-ing holiday
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment
As someone who finds games about cars wot go fast only intermittently interesting, I’d expect a game about cars wot go slow to be positively soporific. Speed is, ultimately, the modus operandi of a car. It gets you where you need to go faster than a horse, and doesn’t do annoying things like pooing on your patio or dying (also, potentially, on your patio). Surely, then, playing a game about cars moving at the speed of a dead patio horse defeats the point, like playing a first-person shooter where all the guns fire backwards.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Interactive
The basic premise sees you running a sort-of exploration/logistics company tasked with fulfilling science-based contracts in two large environments, namely Arizona and the Carpathian Mountains. Each contract (or ‘expedition’) has you deploy into one of these environments with a vehicle of your choosing and involves travelling to one or several locations to complete set objectives. You might, for example, have to set up some scientific equipment to measure pollution levels in a Carpathian swamp, or escort a free-range boffin to some ancient stone formation deep in the desert, so they can take photos and interpret their function.
I’ll circle back to the game’s theme and structure later. For now, let’s say it mostly serves to get your vehicles into places they should not normally be. Half-submerged in water, for example, or scrambling up a scree slope littered with the kind of boulders that fearsome cavewomen would crack over the heads of their lousy, good-for-nothing husbands.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Interactive
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Interactive
That same sponginess is also what makes Expeditions so physically satisfying. The way your vehicle rattles along wind-sculpted rock and gouges its way through bubbly peat lights up the same part of my brain that goes ungh when I turn an imp into giblets with a shotgun in Doom. Its tactile simulation of tyres on terrain is one of gaming’s little miracles. And it isn’t just the big squelchy mud ponds that are impressive, the game applies that granularity to a wide variety of surfaces, and the contrasting environments help emphasise this. There’s a clear difference between the gritty dirt of Arizona compared to the soft undergrowth of the Carpathians. Combined with how uniquely rugged each square inch of terrain is, it makes basic driving enormously gratifying.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Interactive
These objectives might be more compelling if they contributed toward a larger story or were written with more colour. But the game isn’t especially interested in either, and doing fake science is quite dull without any characters or stakes to pin it to. Yes, pollution of natural habitats is an important concern in the real world. But I’m not caring about some junk left in a pretend Carpathian swamp unless you make me. It all needs to be a bit more intriguing, whether that’s through tying the expeditions together into a proper arc, or adding in some Discovery Channel-style weirdos to root for.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Interactive
Nonetheless, I find the constant dipping in and out of the world to be quite dissociating. There are shades ofDeath Strandingto Expeditions' combination of delivery runs and slow conquest of rough terrain, but leaving the world after every expedition spoils the immersion. It doesn’t help that the game’s menus are harder to navigate than its own wilderness. Setting up your vehicle for an expedition is far fiddlier than it should be, and even something as simple as deploying to the game world is fraught with pitfalls. The game is particularly bad at displaying where objectives are at the outset, which is a problem when you can potentially deploy tens of kilometres away from it. The basic objective marker is greyed out on the deployment map for some inexplicable reason, and if a mission starts with an ‘explore the area’ objective, good luck finding out which area you’re supposed to explore!
These ruts in the road prevent Saber Interactive from delivering a soil-cold classic, but Expeditions: Mudrunner nonetheless succeeds in its primary objective, to build a world where the car and the ground are at irrepressible odds, and it’s your job to make them work together to crack the case. That case might prove to be mundane fly tipping rather than anything juicier, but watching our dynamic duo constantly wrestle with one another for supremacy never ceases to be entertaining.
