What is there to say about a game which has been out for years that hasn't been said before? Probably not much, but I'm here to try anyway. I started playing this game pretty recently, but I've played through the majority of the content so I think I might have some ideas worth sharing. Warning, I will give zero f-bombs about spoilers, this game does not have a storyline worth mentioning. It's a drivin' trucks game.
First some background on what the game is, for anyone who hasn't been following along. First there was Spintires, which you can no longer buy because of copyright issues (not even getting into that) but which I've still got in my Steam library. It led to/became Mudrunner, the sequel to which is Snowrunner. It's a driving simulation game with mostly Russian and American trucks, in which you haul stuff (or occasionally just go places, or new to this game, cultivate crops.) to complete objectives. You can couple your trucks to trailers, and there is a winching mechanic which is completely divorced from reality in that it is basically a magical lasso.
Most importantly, what this primarily is not is a fast game. There are some time trials, and some of them are even driven quickly if you want to get the "gold" result, but much more of the game involves going very slowly. You will often have lots of time to think about what you would like your line to look like, what your trailer and/or towed vehicle behind you will do, what the trees look like, how much you can see the seams in the skybox on maps with a lot of light in the sky.
Because I am a complainer I feel an actual need to lead with some big complaints. The driving physics ranges between acceptable and tragically comedic, or perhaps comedically tragic. The camera is one of the worst I've experienced in all my years of gaming, which is not only often unable to be where you want it, but also jitters and jumps when you try to put it there. The game stutters during the frequent autosaves, and it does it badly on every third autosave, during which physics itself breaks down. But despite all of this, Snowrunner is still fun in a positive work therapy kind of way.
Positively, the maps are lustrous and complex in a way that it has to be admitted the prequels' weren't. The variety of vehicles is enormous, even without paying for any of the DLC that isn't included in one of the packages with all of the year passes. The trucks absolutely feel fundamentally different from one another, they are not just skins on the same vehicles over and over again. At high resolutions and quality settings, the game is capable of some extremely realistic visuals on occasion. There are real reasons to enjoy playing this game.
The biggest impediment to that, though my opinion may reveal that I take games too seriously, is what I enjoy calling the "comedy" physics engine. On occasion this is enjoyably hilarious, as when you run into a street sign and it pirouettes into infinity. On others it is an impediment to mission completion. The game engine is aware that two objects cannot occupy the same space, but it's also problematic enough to allow it to happen sometimes, with frequently ridiculous Bethesda-worthy results. The first time it happened to me, it resulted in a trailer "stuck" about sixty feet up in the air, where it will stay forever because physics don't happen when you aren't extremely nearby.
The broad variety of trucks is another huge win. There are dozens of trucks in this game even without DLC. Almost all of the vehicles in the game are either licensed or very closely based on real trucks. Most of the Russian trucks are unlicensed, and borrow details from other similar vehicles to get around copyright infringement. They run a range from a few dinky Russian 4x4 cars on up to some logging and crane trucks (and one tank transporter) which are large even for heavy trucks. You have many customization options for almost all vehicles, and this is another strength as well.
As this is a game about trucks, I'm going to write about some of my favorite actual examples. If you do a little "research" you'll quickly find that everybody's favorite truck is the "Azov 7", or Azov 73210. This is a 10x10 with two front steer axles and one rear, which is one of the least prone to roll over and which has all the torque and traction you could ask for. It also has an enormously irritatingly huge front bumper which frequently runs into terrain, and which is not an element of its inspiration, the KamAZ-5350. This used to cause it to take a lot of crash damage, so they tweaked the game to make it take almost none instead of fixing the design, with the result that you can really smash it up without consequences. It can also carry a loading crane and either a flatbed or a fifth wheel "saddle" hitch, and still tow a trailer. It also has a very tight turning radius for its length. Besides the long face, its biggest problem is that it's quite slow, but that's usually the pace of this game.
Another great truck is the Bandit, an 8x8 truck (with two front steer axles) based directly on a real one-off machine, with a shortened bus body for a cab. This truck starts out mediocre and tippy, but when fully upgraded and with the crane removed and carrying a low saddle hitch, it does a number of jobs better than any other truck. It's moderately slow to accelerate, but has very good top speed, and can wear balloon mud tires that allow it to drive through mud that almost no other vehicle can cross without winching. On many maps, this makes it the fastest thing around. On the other hand, on anything but the balloon tires it is quite tippy, and doubly so with a crane.
I like to use these two vehicles together. The Bandit can very rapidly move empty semi trailers around the maps, and can go places most other vehicles can't. The Azov 7 is irritating in the way it runs into the ground, but it does all the things and there is rarely a need to use a larger vehicle. Few of them have satisfactory traction, and of those, none can be equipped with the same range of equipment. I also commonly use two Azov 7s together, both with loading cranes, and always at least one with a low saddle. The 7 towing the flatbed semi-trailer is an absolute must for mission after mission, but having another one along is extremely helpful. With two of them, the leader can pull or the winched vehicle can push, and get through many mud pits which are less than a trailer's length across.
None of this sounds like a very satisfying amount of depth for a modern game, but Snowrunner does actually have some interesting mechanics built on this foundation which give it more complexity. For one thing, you can "pack" cargo or vehicles on trailers; you can also pack vehicles on cargo, or on the roofs of vehicles. The Azov 7 has a big flat roof and there's no roof rack option, but you can stack a little vehicle or a scout fuel trailer up there using the loading crane. You can pull a flatbed trailer onto a flatbed trailer and pack it, then hitch up another flatbed trailer and pack the first two (still loaded up) onto the third and pack them on.
Packed cargo (or trailers or vehicles) will stay put until the trailer rolls over about 45 degrees. Some cargoes are short and some are tall; the short cargoes will often stay in a sideboard trailer until they are tipped over almost 90 degrees, so you can sometimes recover from a partial rollover and repack your cargo if you use them. The game also has wood including various lengths of palletized lumber as well as long, medium, and short logs, three of which are ordinarily loaded into a specific type of log trailer and then packed into a big stack which you have to drag around. But you can also load them manually into sideboard trailers using a logging crane, then "simply" not tip them out of the trailer while hauling them to your destination without being able to pack them. You can put around a dozen logs in a sideboard trailer, more if it's long and the logs are short. Then you can tip the trailer over at your destination in order to unload them, and winch it back up.
The game is organized into regions, and most regions have multiple maps. Regions are named after geographical regions (or they are extremely vague about it for political reasons) and have themes like mud and logging, mud and oil, snow and metal and so on. Mud and snow are essentially the same thing in different colors as far as the game is concerned, but muddy regions have their own challenges with bogs and swamps, while some snowy ones have ice which is uniquely problematic for any tires but chained.
Tire choice is important in many driving games, but it's also terrain-specific here. Mud tires are great on snow, but poor on pavement, and absolutely worthless on icy pavement or rock. Most online wags malign mud tires as giving poor performance on pavement and suggest using off-road tires instead, but in my experience that's not so. Pavement is so much friendlier a surface that the mud tires inexplicably low traction is not important, but mud tires are great for rock crawling and also carry you through mud that no other tire will. On snowy maps you will be using mud tires unless you expect to drive on ice, in which case you will use chained.
I am playing the Steam version. The only reasonable way to buy the Steam version is to get the version with all of the year passes. That gets you access to the most content at the lowest price. Snowrunner also goes on sale pretty much every time there is a sale, so you should absolutely wait for one. None of the additional DLC is really worth buying; all of the stuff you really want comes with the year passes. Snowrunner is also available for Macintosh, PS4, Xbone, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series, and it will run on the Steam Deck. I am playing it on Devuan Linux on a 5900X and 4060 Ti 16GB, and I can do 4k60 with most of the graphics options turned up most of the way, many of them on full. Amusingly, doing a big slog through a big bog will actually cause audibly more work to be done by my CPU, as the water cooling system will throttle up. It's extremely immersive.
I'd give Snowrunner about a B grade. It should be an A, but the physics are awful a lot of the time, and some of the later maps just feel kind of tedious. The fourth or fifth time I've gone in and out of the same quarry, I get the distinct impression that the developers are fixing someone's wagon after they complained that they got through a new region too quickly, even though the quarry itself is magnificent and really gave me the sense of scale I was missing from the first one. But I've also been playing the heck out of it, so clearly I'm willing to overlook the game's flaws enough to enjoy it. What I don't get is how anyone can want to play it on the harder difficulty levels when the physics engine is so likely to ruin your day, but not everything has to be for me.