Spintires: Offroad Truck Simulator (PC)

The menu screen shows a lone forest road soaking in the rays of the setting sun as the gentle sound of birds chirping comes from somewhere nearby – the whole scene is pervaded by a sense of peace and harmony. But appearances can be deceiving – soon enough, the sound of my off-road vehicle’s engine rips through the pristine environment. And there’s a lot of these vehicles in Spintires: from utility vehicles to freight trucks to heavy transports, just about anything that has to potential to leave deep ruts in the mud is available for you to control.

The hard part is getting started

The basic concept of the game consists in loading your vehicle with lumber at a lumberyard and transporting it to a lumber terminal, all on five playable maps. It sounds easy in theory, but in Spintires it ends up being a real challenge. Each round begins at a garage, where the player has to decide the best way to get from point A to point B. All you get in the way of explanation are a few brief text tutorials that can be activated in the game menu. The map itself is of limited use, as most roads are still inaccessible at the beginning, but you can clearly see the location of your main objective, various lumberyards, and other garages, where you can equip your vehicle with extra parts, have it repaired, or fill up your gas tank. You can also see additional vehicles marked on the map, which you can unlock and use when you drive up to them.

Once you’ve messed around with the controls a bit, you shouldn’t have any trouble steering the various trucks. As usual, you use the arrow keys to steer in all directions, and you also have the option of switching between standard and automatic transmission. In the lower left portion of the screen there’s a display that lets you see how much damage your vehicles has sustained and how much fuel it’s used, as well as whether your vehicle’s differential lock or all-wheel drive is activated or not. In Spintires, these are indispensible features when it comes to getting your vehicle out when it gets stuck deep in the mud.

Helter-skelter in the muck

In Spintires, straight paths are few and far between, and don’t look for streets, because you’re not going to find them here. Instead you rumble along through fields and forests in your vehicle trying to find a way through a landscape largely untouched by civilization. You’ll have to scale hills overgrown with grass and shrubbery, navigate through foggy woodlands, and attempt to subdue rushing rivers and murky ponds – but all at a pretty leisurely pace. Even when you’re driving with the more compact utility vehicle and little to nothing to hinder your engine’s performance, there’s no high-speed thrill to speak of. Still, this means there’s always enough time to react to any obstacles you might come across. While you can just steamroll smaller shrubs and bushes, it’s better to give a wide berth to larger clusters of trees and stony outcrops as you make your way to the next lumberyard. You’re also going to have keep an eye out for the next garage, as transporting wood across hostile terrain often requires the right attachments on your vehicle or even a larger truck, like the C-4320, which comes equipped with a crane and a huge cargo bed.

Monsters like these are noticeably more difficult to operate, use up more fuel, and are of course a whole lot heavier, meaning they sink a lot faster into the mud. In Casual Mode there’s no need to worry – if you get stuck in the mud, tires spinning to no avail (and this can happen a lot in Spintires), one click will get you teleported to a garage where you can get all fixed up and ready to get back out there. The flipside is that you forfeit your whole load, and end up having to start over. In Hardcore Mode, things are a whole lot different – since teleportation is not an option here, you’d better have put a lot of thought into the paths you take if you plan on reaching your objective in one piece. You also have the option of using a cable winch to pull your helpless vehicle out of the muck, but this requires a good deal of patience, skill, and finesse, not least of all because of the awkward and difficult camera set-up.

Camera’s a bitch, man

It’s not just the mud that stands in the way of players reaching their destination – it seems like the camera does its damnedest as well. The exterior cameras, which always accompany the vehicle from the rear and to the side, can never seem to reach a fixed position. Instead, they constantly swing back and forth and zoom in way too close to the action, especially on stretches of narrow terrain, requiring players to readjust the camera perspective with the mouse again and again. These annoying camera perspectives are especially noticeable when you’re trying to transport lumber.

If you manage to pick the right truck and reach a lumberyard, you have the option of automatically or manually loading the lumber into the vehicle’s cargo bed. After this, things get a lot more difficult, as the combination of an already-awkward camera set-up with a pile of logs in the pack of your truck has the effect of significantly limiting what you can see. The game could have really used an additional POV from inside the cab for situations like this. The additional weight from all the lumber is also a cause for headaches – you’d better be ready to have to start over if your vehicle gets stuck on a bunch of rocks, winds up sinking hopelessly in a forest pond, or tips over trying to climb an innocuous-looking hill.

A bit more simulation, please

As to whether Spintires is a real, true blue off-road simulator, I’d say it only partially manages to live up to this claim. It’s immediately clear that the game’s physics are a major thing it has going for it – vehicles authentically struggle to cross hill and dale, slide on or get mired in muddy terrain, and depending on how much they weigh, leave deep ruts in their wake. The portrayal of mud in the game deserves special mention – once you drive onto muddy terrain, the stuff splashes in all directions, covering the entire vehicle in a layer of thick brown muck. Also, the heavily forested landscape is beautifully depicted, and the day/night cycle adds an additional level of atmosphere to the game. The game’s sound also scores points with its robust engine noises and fitting woodland background sounds. However, Spintires is completely devoid of any kind of musical soundtrack.

But where there’s light, there’s bound to be shadow – even though the landscapes are beautifully designed, pop-ups can be jarring and there are also certain textures that load slower than their surroundings. This has a negative effect on the overall atmosphere, of course. And the different maps could have really used a bit more variety – you get the impression that you’re just driving through the same area on each one. The various vehicles do show a high degree of detail, bit there’s no trace of any damage model to speak of. Even when you’ve driven your vehicle nearly into the ground according to the damage meter, there aren’t any dings or scratches to be seen. Just as disturbing is the lack of a driver figure, so that combined with the steering wheel that turns on its own, it looks like there’s a ghost crew driving all these vehicles.