In a previous review I moaned about how a lot of the difficulty of Bloodborne was artificially created through tedious, repetitive slogging commutes. So now I am playing Snow Runner, a game that consists entirely of tedious, repetitive slogging commutes by design. Is it good? It might eventually be.
I am 15 hours into this trucking and logistics simulator. The game starts in rural Michigan, which due to flash floods and government underinvestment, has the road infrastructure of tsarist Russia. The meat and potatoes involves hauling heavy cargo from point A to point B, always over mud, snow, rivers, boulders, logs, and slopes. To this purpose, you are offered a wide assortment of off-road, upgradeable vehicles to suit the conditions.
Except that's not true for at least the first 15 hours of the game. You can't unlock better vehicles and upgrades until you have cash and XP, which you do by finishing missions using the weaker, slower, less adapted vehicles... that struggle to beat the missions. The difficulty curve in Snow Runner is backwards. It starts off hard because the trucks you are given can't cope easily, and as a n00b you waste time squirming through vast pits of mud. Sometimes a winch helps to haul the vehicle free, but if your truck is underpowered, and you are faced with a two mile, upwards sloping glacier of filth, then you are going to be painfully dragging yourself from lamp post to lamp post, like the World's fattest Spider-Man. A lot of the terrain might as well be instant death lava, forcing you to restart the mission back at the garage.
The guides helpfully suggest that if you are playing the game this way, you are doing it wrong. Instead you should ignore missions and familiarise yourself with the lay of the land, finding upgrades and safer diversions. This is good advice, but it does mean your approach to playing the game involves not playing most of the game. There are lots of things I haven't tried yet, such as using cranes, big-rigs and farming vehicles, and those are all going to stay locked in the garage whilst I wander around.
Parts of this game are fun. Parts. I enjoy the tactical element, where you have to look at the road ahead and figure out how to avoid the stuff that will knacker your ride. I like the tension of delicately moving 30 tons of steel around and over these obstacles. But just as often, I am annoyed by the tedium of getting almost all the way to an objective, just to get stuck in what may be a literal shit creek. It's not fun hitting that reset button. There are Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy levels of patience required at times, which is not something I have in spades.
Right now I am on a break, having rolled my scout car onto its roof, just meters away from the lookout post I was trying to reach. Perhaps I'll come back to the game, and perhaps I will finish this review describing how much I like Snow Runner. Right now though, it can go fuck itself.
VideoGame Sisyphus Deliveries
In a previous review I moaned about how a lot of the difficulty of Bloodborne was artificially created through tedious, repetitive slogging commutes. So now I am playing Snow Runner, a game that consists entirely of tedious, repetitive slogging commutes by design. Is it good? It might eventually be.
I am 15 hours into this trucking and logistics simulator. The game starts in rural Michigan, which due to flash floods and government underinvestment, has the road infrastructure of tsarist Russia. The meat and potatoes involves hauling heavy cargo from point A to point B, always over mud, snow, rivers, boulders, logs, and slopes. To this purpose, you are offered a wide assortment of off-road, upgradeable vehicles to suit the conditions.
Except that's not true for at least the first 15 hours of the game. You can't unlock better vehicles and upgrades until you have cash and XP, which you do by finishing missions using the weaker, slower, less adapted vehicles... that struggle to beat the missions. The difficulty curve in Snow Runner is backwards. It starts off hard because the trucks you are given can't cope easily, and as a n00b you waste time squirming through vast pits of mud. Sometimes a winch helps to haul the vehicle free, but if your truck is underpowered, and you are faced with a two mile, upwards sloping glacier of filth, then you are going to be painfully dragging yourself from lamp post to lamp post, like the World's fattest Spider-Man. A lot of the terrain might as well be instant death lava, forcing you to restart the mission back at the garage.
The guides helpfully suggest that if you are playing the game this way, you are doing it wrong. Instead you should ignore missions and familiarise yourself with the lay of the land, finding upgrades and safer diversions. This is good advice, but it does mean your approach to playing the game involves not playing most of the game. There are lots of things I haven't tried yet, such as using cranes, big-rigs and farming vehicles, and those are all going to stay locked in the garage whilst I wander around.
Parts of this game are fun. Parts. I enjoy the tactical element, where you have to look at the road ahead and figure out how to avoid the stuff that will knacker your ride. I like the tension of delicately moving 30 tons of steel around and over these obstacles. But just as often, I am annoyed by the tedium of getting almost all the way to an objective, just to get stuck in what may be a literal shit creek. It's not fun hitting that reset button. There are Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy levels of patience required at times, which is not something I have in spades.
Right now I am on a break, having rolled my scout car onto its roof, just meters away from the lookout post I was trying to reach. Perhaps I'll come back to the game, and perhaps I will finish this review describing how much I like Snow Runner. Right now though, it can go fuck itself.