Expeditions: A MudRunner Game Review

Saber has become synonymous with the extreme driving simulation genre, mainly thanks to the Mudrunner series. Following both Mudrunner and Snowrunner, Saber is now boldly venturing into new territory with Expeditions. This shift may leave some fans feeling slightly disappointed while others will be pretty excited about it. Personally, I’ve dedicated dozens of hours to traversing the Carpathians and Arizona, finding enjoyment in every moment.

Instead of focusing on getting from point A to point B, and delivering vehicles or items, Expeditions is focused more closely on exploring the wide open maps and areas the team has built, getting up close and personal with the landscape, on top of the ruined relics and artefacts within it. The vast majority of Expeditions’ quests and tasks are focused on this main crux.

For example, you may be asked to use a drone to explore a series of areas in the rocky barren cliffsides of Arizona, take pictures of the landscape, or find hidden treasure and materials buried in the dirt using a metal detector. This all makes for a significantly more varied core campaign when compared to the games in the series before it. Throughout my journey across the treacherous landscapes, I loved how I always felt like I was doing something fresh, exciting, and different.

While I fell in love with Snowrunner’s flow, the objectives did get more than a little monotonous after a while, however, that same issue never crept up during my time with Expeditions, even when tasks were repeated.

Given that these quests are focused on becoming familiar with the landscape and learning more about it, the two large, rural open sets of maps in the game currently feature very few main roads, or easy-to-traverse paths, which makes the actual act of traversing the landscape far more challenging than Snowrunner and Mudrunner. You are almost always driving through rocky, muddy, uncertain terrain that prevents a myriad of challenges and requires you to thoroughly plan your route to your objective.

This made Expeditions drastically harder than Snowrunner, especially early on when I was getting acclimatised to the new locations. However, once I got a handle on the vehicles and carved out my safe routes in the process (remembering and returning to them in subsequent quests), I found completing tasks far more rewarding here in Expeditions. That immense sense of satisfaction you get when finally making it out of a muddy pit in Snowrunner is amplified here thanks to more of those tricky situations scattered throughout your drive.

Whereas Snowrunner was a game that let you turn your brain off and chill at times, Expeditions requires you to always be on the ball, aware of your environment, the grip your car has on the terrain, and potential obstacles on your route. While that initial difficulty spike when you begin your journey is a stark one, things do become easier as you progress thanks to a wealth of upgrades and tools you can unlock.

These range from improved gadgets like the Snorkel to cross deep rivers and lakes to team members you can recruit in your headquarters before a mission that offers a variety of bonuses and buffs for that specific drive. All of these moving parts create a far deeper progression and upgrade system on top of your typical vehicle performance and storage upgrades. However, these parts don’t always come together and integrate quite as well as I hoped initially.

A variety of in-map upgrades that were experimented with during Snowrunner’s DLC seasons also deepens the planning and strategy side of this series even more. You can pay to build facilities within a map that persists between missions and tasks. For example, you can build a storage facility to hold some extra parts and fuel for your vehicle which you can pick up in the middle of your drive, find additional resources in the map, return them to these spots to top up the storage, and they will be there on your next mission.

It’s a really smart way of making the individual maps feel like they evolve as you drive through them more. However, as with vehicle upgrades, gadgets, and team members, it is another progression system that feels stacked on top of everything else, rather than seamlessly interwoven with the other parts.

This isn’t a huge issue as everything works and there are no serious problems with this progression, but I would have preferred to see something a bit more streamlined that felt more cohesive rather than simply more progression and upgrade systems bundled on top of one another.

On the performance side, I haven’t had too many issues. Vehicle handling feels great and hasn’t changed much since Snowrunner. I also didn’t have any major bugs or crashes in my time playing. The only major issue I noticed was terrain textures, especially around my vehicle would almost always not load in fully, remaining blurry unless I stopped moving my camera.

At a distance, this wasn’t an issue but the cliff faces and rocky paths as I drove over them would be flat. While not breaking the game, it took me out of the experience a bit, especially for a game that is so immersive and realistic in almost every other area. It sticks out like a sore thumb.

However, there have been reports within the community and on the Steam forums that some players are experiencing more drastic crashes and performance issues, although they don’t seem too common.

Even after spending dozens of hours with Expeditions, I am still keen to hop back behind the wheel and discover the tons of secrets I have left to find in Arizona and the Carpathians, upgrade my vehicles, and try out co-op when it comes out. The major difference in objectives and the increased challenge of Expeditions when compared to the games in the series before it, won’t be for everyone.