Spintires, released in 2014, is one of those very distinctly PC games: It's an off-road driving sim, which sounds conventional enough, but instead of racing against Ivan Stewart you're trying to scratch out a living by grinding Soviet-era machines through inhuman mud and muck in the deepest Russian backwoods you can imagine. And it's good—at that one very particular thing.
It's been through a spot of controversy and a rerelease which changed the name, first to Spintires: Mudrunner (which also included a major update to the game itself) and more recently to just Mudrunner. Niche though it is, it was successful enough to warrant a sequel, announced last year as Mudrunner 2. And even though it's not out yet, now it's been renamed, too: Focus Home and Saber Interactive announced at Gamescom today that the new game is now called Snowrunner.
Snowrunner promises a "huge roster" of heavy duty machines and more than 15 sandbox maps to drive them on, some of them four times larger than the maps in Mudrunner. Once again, the job is, literally, a job, as the goal will be to haul various sorts of cargo across some of the crappiest landscapes on the planet. It's really the sort of thing that's meant to be played solo—you, alone against frigid oblivion, your only defense the chunky, shuddering gears of a krAZ-255—but you can go hauling with up to three friends if you like in online co-op play.
Snowrunner is expected to be out sometime in 2020, and will be available through PC on the Epic Games Store.
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