It’s Mudrunner in VR, and it may actually be a better version of the game than we could have expected.
J.J. talks about some of the nice touches and improvements that only virtual reality can provide.
Listen, I love the MudRunner games. They’re just silly fun. The developers are spreading the IP a bit into SnowRunner, Expeditions and more, which are heavy sim games. But this is just MudRunner, classic MudRunner, just parsed it out into smaller chunks and letting us just solve mud-based puzzles, and it’s already one of my favorite VR games I’ve ever played.
MudRunner VR feels so perfectly immersive. The tutorial has us start in a crappy car, trying to get to our uncle or grandfather’s house because he called us needs help. It has us trying to tough the mud, so to speak, and teaching you the ins and outs of the gameplay.
But once we finally get into the big rig itself, it’s an incredible and BIG feeling. We sit in the cab of this thing, have all of the bells and whistles, and have to manually manipulate everything. Our keys are held in the visor, so to start the rig we have to reach up, flip down the visor, grab the keys, put it in the ignition and turn it. To disengage the emergency brake we actually have to reach down, grab it and pull it. We have to manually shift, manually turn on or off our windshield wipers, manually do EVERYTHING.
And so we’re physically in there. When we get in the mud we have to downshift while driving. Running low on fuel? We have to get out and gas up your car, truck, attach the winch to a tree or another car to pull ourselves out.
When we’re that deep into it, when we’re towing a truck and we actually turn around and look behind us to see we’re towing the car, to make sure we didn’t take out a neighbor’s fence or something, it feels thrilling and real. Even down to steering, where we can also steer with our joysticks but we can also just have our hands on the virtual steering wheel, miming that we’re steering. It’s the whole driving experience.
MudRunner VR is the perfect kind of VR immersion. And I can’t wait to go get dirty again and pull some chains.
This review is based on a Quest VR code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest LIVE on June 12, 2024. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
No Comments