It’s a big world out there and despite everyone’s best efforts, not everywhere is covered in cities and suburbs. There’s still wilderness to be found, wild and mostly untamed, although not without evidence of people having been there. Like any place people have been or want to be there’s work to be done there, and the lack of roads are only an inconvenience for the right type of vehicle. Whether that be major or minor inconvenience depends on the driver, but rocky terrain, near-vertical slopes or even a tree that manages to wedge itself in the gap between cab and trailer can be enough to make any drive a challenge. In many games a major boss can be a massive beast of earth-shaking might, but inExpeditions: A Mudrunner Gameit’s frequently something as simple as an inconvenient tree.
Data Collection in the Great Outdoors
The Mudrunner series has been coming along for years now, starting with the now-delistedSpintiresand hitting major success with 2020’sSnowrunner. Those games were about industrialization in the wilderness, hauling logs and other cargo from place to place using massive trucks designed with sheer power as their defining feature.Expeditions, on the other hand, takes a new approach, with the bigger trucks having their place on a few missions, but smaller being better for the most part. This is because so many of the missions are informational, with a focus on preserving the environment rather than stomping all over it. Scan and photograph the terrain for points of interest, ping the depths to test the water, hang live-cams for PR or motion detectors in suspicious areas, and in general keep an eye on the landscape rather than transform it. Bigger trucks to carry heavy equipment come in handy when needed, but bouncing along in the jeep-like KHAN 39 Marshall is not only a huge load of fun, but also practical for a good number of missions.
The biggest difference overall between the earlier-Runnergames andExpeditions, though, is its new mission structure. The previous games dropped you in a map and waved in the general direction of an objective, starting from a home base/garage and opening up the world from there.Expeditions, on the other hand, is more structured in that at the start of each region you need to choose a mission before selecting the right truck for the job and equipping it as necessary. Some missions don’t care what you use, while others have specific equipment requirements that a smaller scout-class vehicle may not be suited for. Additionally, specialists can be hired on a per-mission basis to provide perks and bonuses, and if you’re setting out to, for example, scan water quality, the mission might require the services of a hydrologist.
Specialists come in several different professions, from operators to manager, jaegers, mechanics and more. Each grants their own unique combination of perks, like a mechanic that offers lower fuel consumption or operators marking the vital air drops that resupply fuel and frequently have resources that give a nice little cash bonus at the end of a mission. Everything brought into a mission aside from the trucks you already own has a cost, though, from specialists to non-mission-essential equipment, so a little care may be needed deciding what’s necessary for the next excursion. There is vital equipment that should come along every time, though, like the screw-jack and probably portable anchors, both of which can save a doomed mission.
The fancy tools to get the job done
The terrain is neither friend nor enemy, it just exists, and no matter what it feels like, it isn’t actively working against you. The problem is that trucks and cars are designed around the idea of a landscape that’s been shaped around their use, andExpedition’s settings of Arizona and Europe’s Carpathian mountains are huge areas that haven’t been tamed. This means that rolling a vehicle is inevitable, usually at least once per mission if not more, and there are endless slopes that are simply too steep to get up without a little help. Every vehicle in the game is equipped with a winch system, but in the heavy trucks it relies on a running engine to work and once flipped the engine automatically turns off. This is where the screw-jack comes in, letting you choose where to place the truck within a small radius of the accident, and with a little care, not in an orientation that instantly sees it roll over again.
The anchor, on the other hand, is used in conjunction with the winch. While the Carpathians are covered in trees and almost always have one handy to connect the winch to, Arizona is much more sparse and rocky. The anchor sinks into any dirt within a set radius of the vehicle, and once placed it’s there for the rest of the mission no matter how much pull the truck may exert. There are ways to get up steep slopes without the anchor, such as improving grip by lowering the tire pressure to increase the amount of surface in contact with the terrain, but when an inconvenient rock has made a small ledge you can’t get over, the anchor and winch can work together to conquer a challenging climb. It’s not magic, though, and there are going to be times where the best option is to completely re-plan the route.
Review: SnowRunner
While SnowRunner has a few quirks here and there, overall it’s a fantastic game of exploration and brute-force driving.
The most useful tool in the bunch, though, is the drone, which is another feature all vehicles automatically come equipped with. It’s only got a limited range, extendable if you bring along the right specialist, but being able to take to the air and plot a course through the trees, spy a distant site marker or check out the configuration of rocks on a slope to find the best path up is a fantastic addition to the series. The standard third-person truck view can reveal a lot, but seeing the world from the sky or flying the drone over the edge of a cliff means you can make much better plans, and becomes such an essential tool that it’s maddening when the arbitrary and un-marked no-fly zones ground the drone for no clear reason. The drone also acts as a discovery device for the map, which is detailed enough that you can plot a course through the forested areas with it. Between the drone scouting and the map’s create-a-checkpoint system that lets you create as detailed a route as needed, it’s easy to stay on course. Or you can ignore either drone or checkpointing and enjoy scouting by eye, because the only time pressure is the possibility of running out of fuel.
The Great Outdoors- A work in progress
Expeditionsis a different kind of driving game from the normal type, in that it’s best approached with patience and appreciation for the challenges it brings, and it works well from that perspective. It’s deeply satisfying to plot the perfect route or muscle through an imperfect one, sometimes bounding along through a field before a swamp bogs you down, or getting to a clear ridge after inching up vicious incline. The new mission structure may take a bit to grow accustomed to if you’re aSnowrunnerfan, but it doesn’t take long for additional objectives within each map to show up as you explore, and once you’ve chosen a mission there’s no penalty for wandering away from it to do something else entirely. Additionally, once a job is complete you can choose to either head back to the mission menu or keep wandering the map, tracking down points of interest, clearing side goals, finding new parts for the trucks scavenged from ruined vehicles or towing a stranded truck back to home base. The missions giveExpeditionsa rough structure but don’t define it, and after doing a few in each area, the Free Roam option becomes available. When everything is going as planned it’s a fantastic working vacation in an unspoiled wilderness, but there’s a whole lot of bug-fixing and updates ahead to bring this game to its full potential.
From an update perspective the co-op mode is coming later, allowing up to four players to explore the maps together. That’s a major feature to miss out on at launch, so if that’s important to you then waiting a bit probably isn’t a bad idea.Snowrunnerhas had a great run of free content updates for all players, not just the ones who bought the many Season Pass DLCs, and the plan is forExpeditionsto follow suit. With any luck those updates will also squash bugs and iron out other issues, because there’s a lot to go over here. Recovering from being flipped over, for example, can see part of the truck wedged into the terrain, fused and unmovable until you do a recovery back to base. I’ve only had one freeze that ended up as a crash to desktop, and thankfully the auto-save means I only ended up losing a minute or two of play, but it can happen. Other details like the camera mini-game, where you fish around to find the subject the client wants and zoom into focus, I ended up switching from controller to mouse thanks to the movement being far too sensitive, and the air-drop system I honestly thought was bugged until I realized there was randomization in the system from one run to the next, but the game just doesn’t explain this anywhere. There’s a good and a bad type of “figure it out” andExpeditionshas far too much of the kind that really should have been in the pause-menu Codex.
Closing Comments:
Expeditions: A Mudrunner Gamehas a lot of tidying up to do to become what it should be, but there’s a wonderfully-rewarding game in there once you’ve learned its quirks. I had no idea the map checkpointing system was so useful until I noticed one of the screenshots highlighting it, and then a major point of friction simply disappeared. It also took a bit to get used to the idea that the smaller trucks are better, but it only takes so much wrangling over rocky outcrops or between trees to figure out thatExpeditionsneeds a different approach than earlier games in the series when it comes to tackling the wilderness. Once you learn the way around its awkward menu system, figure out the unexplained gameplay elements and know what bugs to avoid, the gameExpeditionswants to be shines through and it’s a great one. The huge, expansive maps feel like they’ve got endless points of interest, and the challenge in finding each one and carrying out its related tasks rarely ever feels overwhelming. The beautiful landscapes are one of the stars of the show, and there’s a satisfying balance between the open areas that let you explore them at top speed (which is rarely more than twenty miles per hour, if that) and rocky inclines or thin ledges trying to push your wheels off the side. It’s easy to lose hours at a time trekking through the wide open maps ofExpeditions, each new task leading to a new point on the map while you solve one navigation problem after another, until finally the mission is complete. And then, satisfaction in hand, it’s time to load up the next truck and do it again, because nobody knows what’s going to be waiting over that next hill for the curious explorer.
Expeditions: A MudRunner Game
Version Reviewed: PC
