Spintires' is that little rumble of connection you feel somewhere in your mind when your wheels finally get purchase, and you start to move out of a bog that's held you captive for five minutes. Every good car game has that one special moment within which its soul resides - the slow-mo takedown connection of Burnout 3, the first dreamy drift of Ridge Racer. The trucks you get to drive are wonderfully heavy and characterful, and the mud they churn through is a real marvel - grainy and thick as it gets mashed around your axles, deformable enough to send the character of the map into flux as the landscape takes a shoeing. In essence, this is a game about trying to shift a refrigerator through a deep puddle of tapioca pudding, and it turns out that I'm fine with that. If you know StarCraft, this is a very amusing joke. This is where Spintires gets its name, of course - and it's also where it finds its heart.

Chances are you'll be stuck in mud before your first minute is out. Spawn in a truck - spawn as a truck - then set off down the road. Oovee Game Studios has other plans, and they revolve around battered old Soviet technology working its way through some of the least hospitable terrain known to gearheads. Let other driving games revel in sheer speed or - increasingly - the size of the map and the number of other players. Well, the core of it is brilliant anyway. Spintires is arduous, uncompromising, and bare-bones. You'll rarely find one where a simple incline, covered with thick ruts in the earth, will give you so many reasons to fear for your life.

You'll rarely find a driving game where the pace is as slow, as deliberate as Spintires. Over the course of my first morning with Spintires, I've taken a real shine to the D-537, and in this case taking a shine means I've driven it into many trees, bogged it down in much mud, and repeatedly flipped it over on its side, generally while navigating a pool of shallow water. The thing that might not happen already has. I doubt that will do any good, though: the D-537 seems world-weary and downtrodden. If it was possible for a truck to look bullied, the D-537 has it nailed I've been messing around on Google for the last 10 minutes trying to find the Soviet beast that inspired it, just so that I can track one down to a garage somewhere unlikely and give it a hug. It's flat and it's somehow clenched, with those two oblong window panes providing sombre stand-ins for huge, brimming eyes.

Spintires' D-537 truck has such a sad face.

Serial number spintires