Expeditions: A MudRunner Game Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Saber Interactive has hit a surprisingly rich vein of offroad driving fun with its excellent MudRunner series, itself a spin-off from the glory days of Oovee Studio's Spintires. The dev's latest effort, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, feels like an attempt to capitalise on this somewhat niche franchise's unexpected popularity by serving up a flashy open world entry that appeals to even more mainstream-minded gamers. And it works, just about.

Yes, we are big fans of MudRunner, even bigger fans of its follow-up SnowRunner, and we've been chomping at the bit to get our hands on this open world version of the very exacting, and often ferociously punishing driving experience that is hauling a ton of crap up mountains, through mud, across rivers, and just generally anywhere and everywhere you probably shouldn't go in a massive-ass vehicle.

If you've played any of these games before you'll know the score here, you need to take a whole bunch of different trucks and scout vehicles deep into unwelcoming terrain in order to complete objectives that test your driving skills to the max. The shift for this new title is that, instead of just hauling goods, this time you're part of a scientific discovery project, so the focus is on exploration, on charting the dark edges of the map and pushing through new terrain, rather than the comparatively dry sandboxes of its predecessors.

Instead of one whole open world the game is divided into three large maps, for the time being. You'll take on your first missions in the tutorial-styled zone of Colorado, before moving onto the larger Arizona and Carpathian Mountain maps. Each region here is filled with things to discover that make your life easier, there are points at which you can build outposts to stock up on goods, repair, refuel and rethink your plans going forward. You can mark out safe routes, create base camps to fast travel and even mark out deposits of resources to keep everything ticking over.

The more you explore and make a region your own, the more you'll feel as though you're taming actual wilderness, and this makes for a reasonable leap from the much more mundane mindset we tend to approach activities from in SnowRunner, where it's all just about getting the job done. Here it feels as though everything you do carries more weight, there's more purpose to your activities, which is lucky as really not much else has changed once you move past the framing of how the gameplay is served up.

So, yes the scope is larger, the hills you'll need to grapple up, the rivers and mountains you'll need to cross, it's all much more epic in scale and scope - heck it feels like a car-based Death Stranding at times - which is a good thing - but the underlying principles and gameplay remain the same as ever, so don't kid yourself into thinking your getting Forza Horizon with winches, this is slow-moving stuff where you'll rarely ever pick up a great deal of speed.

It is much more beginner-friendly; the menus for upgrading are easy to peruse, there's nothing complicated about swapping out trucks for different jobs, and the game does a great job of pointing you to the things you'll need on any given expedition. Maybe you'll want to take extra winch points or a jack to flip up an overturned ride if there's gonna be a ton of hills or thick mud, for example, and there are also lots of cool toys to play around with now as you mark out routes.

You can pulse radar to check water depths in your immediate vicinity, again very Death Stranding, send a drone up into the sky to check for ways forward or around an obstacle, and ensuring that you mark routes and think ahead will make all the difference when you're tasked with traversing a large distance. So, it's basically SnowRunner et al on a much larger scale with more exploration, nicer graphics and a more streamlined UI and route through its campaign. All good. All very good, in fact. However, it does feel as though Expeditions: A MudRunner Game has arrived a little half-cocked.

It's not a huge deal, there is still a lot of content to get stuck into already (100+ hours if we've been informed correctly), and there's bound to be plenty more down the line, but at launch we are missing a planned co-op mode that we reckon could make the difference between very good, great even, and something next-level. If the co-op mode brings proper teamwork and planning into play we're looking at a game that we'll be diving into for years to come. The core of this one is just that good, that mix of exacting driving action and environmental puzzling against some incredibly impressive in-game physics, it just really scratches a very deep itch.

Whilst we're doing the negative bit, we should also mention that, although performance is generally fine, and we haven't had any framerate issues to speak of, there is an ongoing issue with texture pop-in, especially on ground surfaces, that needs a bit of fixing because it can be quite noticeable at points. It's a shame, because otherwise it all looks and sounds immaculate (there are some awesome liveries to unlock in this game) and is a big step up visually from the team's last outing.

For now though, all things considered, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game has still positioned itself at the front of the pack when it comes to this excellent franchise. It's the biggest, boldest, shiniest, sleekest and most user-friendly entry in the series to date, a bonafide banger for those who dig its slow-moving style of play, and a game that offers up an absolute ton of challenges and adventure as things stand right now.

It nails the sense of adventure, gives you plenty of upgrades and parts to work towards nabbing and that tricksy core gameplay loop is as addicting as ever. However, we have a feeling this one is really gonna come alive once you've gained the ability to have a friend along for the incredibly bumpy ride.