The C-4320 burps pollution out of its side when you step on the gas in a way that you're possibly not expecting the first time you fire it up the D-537 has a forlorn pane of glass for a front screen that makes it look like it's trying not to cry. The genius of building a game around aging Soviet tech is that, for the Western audience, there's a freshness to the whole thing, a kind of rust-dappled exotica. It's a waltz, really - a waltz off a cliff. Still, when it moves, it's like a glorious symphony orchestra of cobbled-together shoddiness, all playing slightly different tunes with the same cheery enthusiasm. This is what the Mystery Machine might look like, I reckon, if Scooby and Shaggy and the gang had all been Stakhanovites. From the back, it's just a box, and there's something of a stoner van to its outline. My favourite character is a clanking snout-nosed rust-heap called the C-4320. All of Spintires' vehicles are culled from the spirit of the old Soviet Union, and they have a wonderful blunt ruggedness. Eliot was fond of the shift from third to fourth too.)Īctually, you're more of a Jeep. Most of all, you are the wheels, the tires, the roots that clutch. You are the axles and the juddering gears. Don't peer in through the mud-splattered windshield, because you know for a fact that there's nobody in there. This matters, because a sense of transformation, of becoming somebody else, is one of the first things so many games squander, isn't it? The moment you mantle and you don't feel the creaking in your arms, the moment you look down and you don't see your legs. It's a car game, in that it's a game in which you play a car.

This isn't a racing game, and it's barely a driving game. Somewhere else is Spintires' home turf, in fact. The UI bounces around wonderfully as you rattle over the terrain. But you're not stuck where you used to be stuck. Metal starts to move and then it all rocks forward at once - forward, forward, forward, over a tiny, invisible hill. It catches - or rather you catch on it - and then there's this tantalising moment of pre-lurch. But something far beneath you has shifted imperceptibly, putting you fleetingly in contact with solid matter. You're stuck deep in the mud and you've been churning up spray for minutes. But testify! It takes place at a speed of roughly no miles per hour - the speed at which almost all of this astonishing and rackety confection plays out. Did-I-just-hit-that-badger? off.Īnd beyond fourth? I hear good things about fifth gear, too. You were off before, of course, but now you're off. A catch! Something fast trades with something faster: you're hooked and then you're off. You reach forward for the gear stick or whatever it's called, you push - or you pull or whatever you do - and there's a sort of sinewy catch. Ask an ordinary person if they're willing to rob a bank with you, and the moment they're most likely to say yes is the moment when they move from third to fourth. For the car, it's all like, 'Oh, we're doing this are we? I guess you really want to get to that Mexican restaurant.' But for the driver, it's more of an anticipatory thrill, a twitch of everyday nihilism.

I can't drive, and I will probably never learn, but still: I hear very good things about the shift from third to fourth gear.

Spin tires game play now