General Information
Being a VR game, this iteration of the franchise puts you in the boots of the main character, with the opening tasks comprising of borrowing tools, changing tires, and refueling your car through found gas cans.
Once you have your footing, you can progress out of the small town and into bigger and better locations with bigger and more capable trucks!
Muddy By Name, Muddy By Nature
As the title implies, you haul-ass performing multiple tasks across muddy, bogged-down, environments, spewing mud up the sides and windscreen.
External movement is done by way of teleportation, which I didn't like. You point and click where the boots are on the ground, they're white if you're moving around and yellow when you position yourself in a place that is ready to perform a task or start an objective.
You use the grip buttons to pick things up and you pour petrol into your vehicle, pull switches or press buttons to grab and interact with things on the map.
Getting into your car you grab the door handle, swing the door open and you're teleported inside. From here you must put the key in the ignition, turn it, put the shifter into a gear (or auto), and release the hand brake, or parking brake to set off.
Internally, the VR controls are pretty intuitive until they aren't, and it's weird to explain without having it in front of you to look at and feel, but I'll try my best to put my experiences and frustrations into words.
To accelerate, you have to squeeze the right trigger, but to hold onto the steering wheel you have to use the left or right side "grip" buttons, which means you're holding two buttons down: no problem. You can grip the wheel with your left hand and accelerate with the right hand off the wheel if you want, this frees up your right hand for inputting your routes on the GPS system.
The problem comes if you're using both hands and need to reach across yourself to hit the windscreen wiper button or interact with the GPS screen.
This is where you'll need to release the grip button on your right hand, remain holding the right trigger to continue accelerating, but then shift gripping to the left controller with the side button, and don't hit the left trigger, else you will be trying to accelerate and reverse at the same time.
It's quite a juggling act until muscle memory kicks in and you find better ways to play, but even then the sensitivity of the controllers can randomly go wild and you see your hands crossover in the most dangerous way imaginable in a moving vehicle, while your tires scream and your car locks itself into an instant side-on sliding skid.
It happened a few times when I was very comfortably sitting there and enjoying the driving simulation on a gravel path, I hit some mud and started getting bogged down, you have to turn the tires slightly to get traction, and all of a sudden I'm at full lock thanks to iffy control sensitivity.
Graphically Bland, Adventurously Mundane
Graphically, this game is very basic. Almost PS2-level basic. The textures and geometry are incredibly remedial with very basic buildings and objects for the most part. The lighting seems baked in with very few shadows emanating from any object and the models just sit on top of one another with no attempt to make them look organic, weathered, or aged into the surroundings.
I'm quite perplexed at seeing testimonials for this game on the Meta Store stating that the graphics are super realistic because I don't see it. If you look at the screenshot of the gatepost, for example, it has extremely basic geometry that's plonked on the ground texture with no granular detailing. It's very much a mobile phone-looking, basic Android game.
There are some nice little touches in your vehicles, such as the mud spatter and smears as your windscreen wipers clean up your vision, and the rearview mirrors are done surprisingly well, but the modelling and fine detailing of each vehicle are pretty poor in all honesty, but I guess this is a stripped-down version of a console game, built for mobile VR as opposed to PCVR or current-gen console VR.
I would say the opening menu section with the warehouse aesthetic showcases the most effects and detailing in the entire game, with lighting bouncing off walls, and lots of bits and pieces strewn around the chalkboard, the rest of the game appears quite sparse in detail.
I understand the difference between PCVR, Console VR and Mobile VR and this game was never going to be on par with games like Gran Turismo, or Project Cars, but even then I still found it very much disappointing in terms of attention to detail and finesse. I know that the Quest 3 is far more capable in the graphics department than this game would have you believe, so there is no real excuse to sit on the fence and neither be heavily stylised nor incredibly realistic. It's a bit blah.
A Staunch Simulation
MudRunner VR is not so much the open-world adventure of its console cousins, it's more mission-based than a true sandbox.
The variety of missions is reasonable, but most begin with the same 3 steps to entry (gas up, get in the car and drive off) followed by the next step finally being the one for that mission in specific. Some missions see you hauling loads with the emphasis on not sinking too deep and draining all your fuel, and others have you towing and winching stuck vehicles out of the titular mud and simply getting from point A to point B at your leisure; there are no timers or major crunches to contend with, which makes the game pretty chilled compared to if you were stressing out and rushing around to meet a deadline.
Once you graduate from your little car to the bigger, more capable trucks the game takes off a little, with more power and control behind the wheel and more vehicular jostling across the terrains. The suspension and sensation of sinking is pretty neat, but it's not massively varied and more often than not it annoyed me getting bogged down and having to set myself free again and again.
You can't even use the winch whenever or wherever you wish, it's constrained to certain points in predisposed places. This ruins any idealistic freedom you may have hoped for; it's no sandbox, it's a mudbox.
I suppose the mud is the main antagonist here, it is the biggest feature, and the most enduring struggle is against its suffocating ability to ruin your day. In that respect, the game simulates mud well and if the game looked better and had more dynamic and action-packed missions thrown in, I could see this being a great title for anyone to jump into.
As it stands I think this is for the OG MudRunner fans and people who like to endure mundane simulated tasks for some masochistic reason.
