You start at a garage with a few trucks to choose from, and the map has several locked points of interest scattered around it. The problem is that there’s one of you and a good number of jobs to be completed before you can start hauling lumber, plus maintenance along the way.

The point of every map is to deliver logs to the mill, which doesn’t sound particularly exciting on the face of it.

Water flows where it wants, trees grow on the land that isn’t submerged, hills poke up wherever they like and you get to work around all this using roads that are little more than a couple of ruts cleared out of the forest when there’s any road at all. Development never stopped, but the updates eventually did, and now Spintires: MudRunner picks up where the first version left off with new vehicles, updated graphics, tweaked physics, more maps and gameplay modes, and the same wild outdoors that isn’t so much hostile as it is completely indifferent to your existence. The original version went from tech demo to Kickstarter to Early Access and then full release, but even after release it kept getting updated with new content. It’s also not a sequel to the original Spintires, but rather the continuation of the game after relations with the original publisher fell through.

Spintires: MudRunner isn’t a game about taming the wilderness, but rather surviving it in a fleet of trucks, cars, and other specialized equipment. Spintires: MudRunner sets you in the barely-settled wilderness with a collection of vehicles designed to deal with the harshest conditions, but all the heavy engineering in the world doesn’t help when the mud is deep, bridges are chunks of unfinished wood held together by wishful thinking and the necessary resources to get out of the current mess are back at the garage on the other side of the map. Not everything revolves around getting places when the road has already been cleared, and for that you don’t need top-gear white knuckle driving, but rather power and careful judgement of the terrain. Need for Speed, Burnout, Forza, Dirt Rally and an endless parade of other racing titles have the “fast” thing covered, but the thing about speed is that it’s only one of the great things about driving a vehicle. Zipping down the road at top speed to prove nobody’s a better, speedier, more skilled driver is an incredible rush. One of the great things about cars is going fast.

How to play spintires mudrunner early