The next generation of off-road hauling.
SnowRunner is a driving simulation game on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, developed by Saber Interactive and published by Focus Home Interactive, and is the latest in the SpinTires franchise. The game tasks players to perform various truck-related tasks across difficult terrain, including taking goods between locations, recovering vehicles and scouting locations.
This game provides examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Zigzagged. You can sell vehicles and trailers for exactly as much as they cost, and on standard mode, recovery, repairs, and fuel are all free, so you're not punished for getting stuck (aside from lost time), experimenting, or being so low on funds you need to switch entire vehicles to tackle different terrain. However, you must find certain upgrades and vehicles in the world before you're allowed to buy more of them (even if it means hiking to the top of a muddy mountain and dragging the vehicle across the entire map). Oh sure the store has an infinite supply of those gearboxes in the back, but you can't buy more until you go find the one buried at the bottom of the local sinkhole. Have fun!
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Despite some of the vehicles having multiple seats for passengers, only one player is permitted to be in a vehicle at a time.
- Big Badass Rig: Naturally, being a game all about trucking.
- Boring, but Practical: The Fleetstar f2070a is most players' workhorse for much of the early game, due to being found for free in front of your starting garage with all of its upgrades being nearby and very easily acquired using your scout. Its most significant drawbacks are the relatively small tires and weak engine options but despite these it is more than capable of completing every contract in Michigan on its own.
- Bottomless Fuel Tanks: Averted. You'll need to keep your vehicles fueled in order to keep using them, especially when fuel-thirsty engines and all-wheel drive come into play. Many vehicles actually have smaller-than-reality fuel tanks as well, to add more emphasis to this.
- Broken Bridge: Quite a few of them. Across the games' maps you will find a lot of areas where the road is impassible until you complete a contract to render it usable again (which can be a literal broken bridge). Justified, as these contracts will (most of the time) be the player providing the resources necessary to make the road usable.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Highway Trucks. Given the game is mostly about offroad trucking, these vehicles are not generally well-liked by players as they tend to be useless on anything but paved roads, which are very rare and unlikely to be in good condition.
- The Darkness Gazes Back: In some areas at night, you can see glowing eyes gazing at you from the dark, likely belonging to wolves or some other local wildlife. Of course, they pose no threat to you some you spend the whole game inside vehicles. Shining your lights on them reveals that
they don't have bodies. - Directionless Driver: When undertaking a transportation job, the only things you are told are "where you can get the cargo you need" and "where the cargo needs to go". It's up to you to pick your vehicle and plan out the route.
- Gets worse on hard mode as the game doesn't tell you where you can source the needed cargo until you've discovered the location for the first time. Thankfully the destination is always marked however.
- Disk One Nuke: The Azov 64131. If the player can scrape together just under $94k (easily doable by completing some quick jobs and selling your starting vehicles), this can be purchased in Taymyr as soon as the tutorial has finished. This thing is fitted with all the essentials as standard, has the power to cross every hazard in the first zone and a half of Michigan like they were paved roads, and by the time anything puts up a challenge its upgrades are ready.
- The Western Star 6900 TwinSteer is the only truck in the game that can carry 4 units of cargo without needing a trailer, and is found (needing some simple repairs) in Michigan. It does lack 4WD initially (with said upgrade part being located in one of the DLC maps), but for a good portion of the game it'll be able to simply power through most terrain types without it.
- Emergency Cargo Dump: A potential maneuver the player can use to get out of a mess, as the weight of your cargo is a factor that needs to be considered. Some of the contracts in the game are where other people have done this, and the player must now retrieve the dumped cargo and return it.
- Fauxrrari: Played straight for Russian trucks and military trucks and averted for American and Canadian civilian trucks.
- Game Mod: Industrious modders have added a wide array of vehicles and addon content ranging from under- to over- powered and serious to silly, and many can even be used on consoles after going through a dev approval process. The main restriction for console approval is branding; you can't make a one-to-one copy of a Chevrolet or a Toyota and call it exactly what it is; custom designs and Bland-Name Product versions only!
- Grappling-Hook Pistol: Every playable vehicle can use a winch line to tether onto convenient objects (mostly trees and stumps, but also utility poles). Most of them require the engine for power and your engine fails if you roll over, but they're still quite useful either for a little extra torque when you're bogged down, or for keeping yourself (and your cargo) stable during a tight/precarious turn. They're also useful for towing other vehicles, though maybe don't try to tow a giant 10x10 with your dinky little Khan Lo-4F: it won't end well.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The ZikZ 605R (MAZ-537 heavy artillery truck) available as Season 4 DLC. It is widely considered the "king" of all available trucks in the game, with absolutely monstrous torque to keep it moving through any conditions, beefy 62" mud tires that plow through deep mud like it's nothing, a roof-mounted supply/fuel rack, a stable and rugged stance that makes it very hard to tip over and a wide variety of attachments that make it an incredibly versatile and unstoppable heavy truck. This is balanced out by how absolutely difficult and time-consuming to acquire it is, requiring a trailer in Urska River, Amur to be recovered from the middle of deep, inaccessible snow on the other side from the garage spawn point and then delivered to unlock a warehouse located across an obstacle course of impassable ice fields and rivers. Once that warehouse is unlocked then materials from that warehouse must be trucked across the entire map up icy and hilly roads to rebuild not one but three separate bridges that allow access to the map where the ZikZ is. However the gateway to travel there is collapsed so a separate mission must be then completed where multiple materials must be once again transported from the aforementioned warehouse (said mission requires enough materials that multiple trucks must be fully loaded to accomplish this). Then once the next map Cosmodrome is accessible, repair supplies and fuel must be now transported through treacherous and difficult to navigate terrain (including a rockslide blocking the main road and deep mud/ice) to the broken down ZikZ (which itself is in a section of the map that is incredibly difficult to access, requiring an extremely capable and small vehicle to navigate the deep swampy mud and narrow mountain trail that leads to the vehicle). However once unlocked the ZikZ quickly justifies the herculean effort needed to obtain it; the vehicle's only downsides are the lack of chained tires for icy conditions and an inability to equip a sideboard/crane combination as well as a low saddle for towing.
- Infinity -1 Sword: The TUZ 420 Tatarin, a demilitarized 8x8 "scout" vehicle. You have to find one in the Russian wilderness and completely repair it before you can claim it, but nothing so much as slows it down. Incredible engine power, an armored chassis that prevents engine damage from collisions, and a unique tyre type that treats mud like a paved test tracknote . This is "balanced" by the truck lacking a tow hook so it nominally can't be used for deliveries, but it's more than powerful enough to pull almost anything with its winch line anyway.
- Item Crafting: The Phase 2 update introduced a few crafting stations for cargo to be delivered. Items to be crafted include concrete slabs and blocks, metal rolls, cabins, pipes, and metal beams. Certain maps have no or very limited initial sources of "refined" materials like planks, necessitating the player retrieve logs from a nearby logging station, take it to a sawmill, turn it into planks there, and then deliver it to the final destination. Complicating matters, certain sites in later maps also require that a mobile generator be towed out to them, and these generators consume fuel with each crafting use so they need to be kept topped up as well.
- My Car Hates Me: Not every vehicle is suited for every kind of terrain, and taking the wrong vehicle (or if you set the vehicle up wrong for the terrain, such as trying to use highway tyres in thick mud) will usually result in getting the vehicle utterly stuck.
- Noob Bridge: Directly north of your first garage (and the end of the tutorial) is a deep bog covering the main road. Scouts will struggle to get through it and none of your starting cargo-carriers stand a chance, which appears problematic as the warehouse that supplies materials to fix up alternate routes is on the other side. Solving this conundrum can teach two things: first, roads are only a suggestion even to heavy truck (going off-road with careful use of low gear will get your starting trucks around the mudpit); second, scout properly and consider all the resources available to you (there are pre-placed trailers with just enough resources to repair enough of another main road to open a much easier route, but it involves realizing a certain mountain bypass is more forgiving than the map makes it look).
- Resurrect the Wreck: A few contracts in the game task the player with repairing wrecked trucks. Sometimes, the reward for these contracts include the newly-repaired truck.
- The Fleetstar f2070a, most players' workhorse for much of the early game is found in front of your starting garage in Michigan for free but with every single component broken. Thankfully, there's also a service trailer at your garage allowing you to fix the Fleetstar immediately.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Headed to Alaska or the Kola Peninsula? Better pack some chain tyres, or else you're going to be sliding around everywhere!
- Watch the Paint Job: SnowRunner features localized damage, so causing too much damage to one area will compromise the vehicles' performance. For example, damaging the vehicles' fuel tank may cause a fuel leak, causing your reserves to deplete even when the vehicle has its' engine off.
- What a Piece of Junk: A lot of the vehicles look dated and rusty if purchased new, or found caked in mud in the middle of a swamp. This doesn't prevent them from performing exceptionally well.
- The Workhorse: Several of the vehicles are significantly old, but are more than capable of performing the job just as well as the newer ones. Sometimes better.
