Spintires

Update 25.03.15
Positive:
+ Terrain deformation
+ Tire pressure simulation
+ Realistic water behaviour
+ Driving physics in general
+ Maps are pretty big, and full of challenging terrain
+ You can mow down trees ^_^
+ Multiplayer
+ Vehicles of all sizes, ranging from the small UAZ (Jeep) to the monstrous 8x8 Maz.
+ Winching is fun and very useful. You can attach it to both other vehicles and trees.
+ Attaching a crane to your truck, to pick up lumber, move rocks out of the way and sometimes to help push the truck up.
+ The game is very well optimized.
+ Trucks take damage, and consume fuel. You can install a utility addon for mobile repairs, or a fuel cistern for re-fueling in the field.
+ Patch released on 27/10 -14 added wheel support.
+ Patch released on 27/10 -14 added analogue controller input.
+ Patch implemented individual saves for all maps. Big plus in my book.
Negative:
- The camera could be much better. With the tallest addons it can be a real challenge to see ahead.
- Maps could be more varied. It's mostly the same mix of grass, trees, mud and water.
- The only official objective is to haul lumber. More variety would be welcome.
- Lack of proper manual shifting.
- Draw distance should be customizable.
With all that said... As a VIP backer on the kickstarter campaign, and having had access to the beta since May 9, I can safely recommend this game to anyone with an interest in off-roading. If you've tried the tech demo, you know what to expect. Just think bigger; more trucks, more functionality and much bigger maps. All in all, even in beta, this is perhaps the most fun I have had in a realistic off-road game so far. Try the tech demo first; if you like it - there's a safe bet that you will enjoy the full game.
The devs seem committed to continuing to improve the game after launch, both with free updates and dlc packs later on.
Check out this link for planned changes to the game:

THERE IS A TECH DEMO AVAILABLE FOR FREE, GET IT HERE;
I think that Spintires could be accurately described as quite a devisive game, that is to say that you'll probably either really like it, or find it the most mind numbing tedium you've ever experienced in gaming. It's like Marmite, you'll either love it, or you'll hate it.
Personally, I love it. The games that I tend to enjoy most are those that afford you a great deal of freedom to choose what you want to do and how you want to do it. in short, I love sandbox games. I think that Spintires could be described as a sandbox, admittedly all you can do is drive around in some mud, but you're free to choose the vehicle you want to use, the modifications for that vehicle, the direction you drive said vehicle in, create challenges for yourself and so on. If, like me, you're into your sandbox games then I highly recommend that you try it. I find it a great game to finish an evening's gaming with. It helps to wind me down from explosions, guns, violence and high levels of intensity commonly found in games (at least the games I play) these days. Put your favourite album on, play half an hour of this game and you should be pretty chilled out.
In terms of actual content, there are seven different vehicles, ranging from a little jeep, to a massive eight-wheeled leviathan of a machine, each with customisable features, such as trailers and tyres, and five different maps. Each map is about 1 Km squared. This may not sound like an awful lot of space to play with, especially if you're into your sandbox games, but the nature of the landscape is such that the challenge is more or less constant and you're not often moving with a great deal of speed. For example, if you make a journey across one of the more challenging maps with a trailer full of the medium sized logs, without any hitches, then it'll probably take you about fifteen to twenty minutes. I have never felt like I wanted bigger maps. That said, dont expect much aesthetic variety between maps, they all look very similar, broadly speaking. However, as I have said, some maps are certainly harder to navigate than others. In terms of what there is to do, it really depends on how inventive and creative you are as a gamer. If you like to stick to the formal objectives of a game, that is, what the game is explicitly telling you to do, then you'll be sorely dissapointed. The objective on each of the five maps is the same, unlock all of the cloaked areas, discover and unlock all of the vehicles present on the map, discover and unlock all the garages on the map, and deliver timber from the lumber mill to the objective. That's it in terms of formal missions. That said, getting your first load of lumber to the mill is incredibly satisfying. On par with landing on the moon for the first time in Kerbal Space Programe (KSP players will know what I'm talking about). If you're more creative and create your own challenges then you'll get a lot more mileage out of this game, for example, driving across one of the maps without using all wheel drive in the UAZ. If you're an experienced sandbox gamer then you'll get far more mileage (literally) out of this game.
I have to put in a word for the aesthetic appeal of this game. In my opinion, Spintires is one of the most beautiful games I have in my library, although I'm aware that there are others who hold the contrary position (beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all). The graphics are quite unique, they have an almost tilt-shift kind of thing going on (if you don't know what that is, google it, I guarantee you'll like what you see, no, it's not boobs). They're almost kind of stylised. The look of the vehicles and the environment do an incredible job of creating this wonderful Russian ambience.
The physics, on the whole (I'm looking at you, magical jumping rocks) are stellar. The ground deformation (in most cases) is reliable and beautiful to look at. I can safely say that I am not aware of any other game that has done it as well as Spintires has. The water is also amazing. It looks gorgeous driving through it, having it splash around your truck, rather than being this inert entity in the game world. The suspension on all the vehicles is awesome, as is the tyre deformation. It legitimately looks like your vehicle is driving over what it is supposed to be driving over (or through, on some particularly bad roads you'd be hard pressed to say that you were actually driving on the road). Trees shake as you bump into them, flex as you anchor you winch to them and pull, saplings bend and snap as you drive over them. If you like physics games, or games that do physics well, and can justify buying a game on those grounds then I'd recommend picking this up. If you like BeamNG Drive or Next Car Game for their physics, then you'll like Spintires (but not because of the soft body physics, I hasten to add. The soft body physics are perhaps the only aspect of the physics in Spintires which may be considered to be deficient).
On top of this the game runs (in my experience) very well indeed. I'm not particularly well versed in performance and optimisation, so I cant say much here, but what I can say is that this game runs considerbaly better than you might think. I do all my gaming on my Lenovo Z585 Ideapad, so I'm running it on an AMD Radeon 7660G + 76070M dual graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a quad-core processor, running on Windows 8. It's a less than ideal gaming setup, but it's the best that I can justifiably afford. I can run Spintires with everything at maximum and get a (fairly) solid 30 frames per second, often higher. So for those of you like me out there with low-powered rigs, then spintires is probably a game you can enjoy in all it's glory. Again, if you're having reservations based upon doubts about how well it'll perform, get the tech demo (link at top of review, it's free).
Most of what I've said so far has been positive, however, there are a couple of negatives. Don't expect frequent updates. Even the updates that there have been really have not changed much. This is probably down to Oovee being such a small studio. Also (I can't verify this, since I've not played the multiplayer), apparently you can't save your progress in multiplayer, once you quit the game, all the work and cool stuff you are your friends pulled off is gone. On the subject of saving, there are no quicksaves. You can't roll up to a river and quicksave just in case you don't make it across. It's do or die. For some this may be incredibly frustrating. For me, however, I tend to find that the absense of a quicksave feature forces me to play much more carefully and methodically. It gives real weight to challenges, and provides a genuine sense of achivement when you overcome an obstacle. I can see why people may not like this, but personally, it's a feature who's ommission I am pleased with.
So overall, I'd say Spintires is a great, unique, solid game. But get the tech demo and decide for yourself. Oh, a word of warning, if you buy Spintires because you liked the tech demo and expect lots of new features and a good deal more 'game' then you're going to be dissapointed. If on the other hand you're infatuated with the tech demo and want some more trucks and maps to play with then you'll be delighted.
TL;DR, Get the tech demo and decide for yourself (link at top of review).
Thanks for reading, hope this helped :).

Definitely not worth the full price of $30, but you are able to pick it up on sale (like right now with the Steam Summer Sale), it can be a fantastic mud bogging game. Can't forget about the Unobtainium winch that is a get out of jail free card given you have a tree nearby.
Only gripe I have with this game is the lack of the devs doing anything with the game, on the other hand, the people that make the workshop content are excellent.

I have over 500 hours in SpinTires and over 300 hours in the SpinTires editor creating custom maps for the game. After reading a lot of the negative reviews I realize why some people think this game is not worth the money. It is true the developers have been very slow on releasing any updates but the modders have taken this game and turned it into the best offroading game out there.
Custom Vehicles: Currently the game now has workshop support for all modded vehicles. All you have to do now is subscribe and at map selection you can pick whatever vehicle you want to drive. Modders like Sid, Brute, Vengeful Maniac and many others have created highly detailed and realistic offroading rigs to drive.
Custom Maps: There are tons of free maps made by modders on spintires.nl. The maps are usually around a 50mb to 100mb download. They come in a zip file. You open up the zip and there are two level folders inside. All you do is drop those in your Spintires/Levels folder and start the game up. You will have to disable achievements to play with custom maps and trucks.
The other mod that makes this game amazing is Spintiresplus. Its a simple download and install from Spintires.nl. You simply drop the files into your main Spintires folder and its done. It has a config file that you can edit with notepad to change little things in the game like a battery winch so you can flip your vehicle back over if you get stuck without any friends around.
If you can handle that little bit of mod installation then this is hands down the best offroading game out there with new maps and vehicles being released on almost a daily basis.

First things first: never play this game in single player, its like having only 1/4 of the fun.

One of the best games i heve played in my life.
The reasoning for this is that this game looks like another dull singleplayer simulator ALTHOUGH it isnt!
The goal is very simple, get logs from one side of the map (lumbercamp) to the other side('s) of the map (sawmill).
But achieving this goal is not as easy as it seems.
Yesterday before i started a Hardcore map with 4 friends we discussed around 15 min what our plan of approach was for a specific map.
We thought we had it all figured out... we were wrong.
But we had the uttermost fun in being wrong while our trucks broke down, fell down, did a roll over, got stuck, or drowned.
Underestimate this game while you buy it. and recieve a big fat middle finger in your face while playing and having stomach ache's of the laughing.
Do you recommend this game? HELL YES

I'm purely writing this review over everyone getting angry at the dev. The dev started this game and eventually found a publisher. When the publisher took the money and ran he stopped development. Once the money stopped the publisher tried to pretend they were going to pay him hoping they might get him not to kill their cash cow. They ran off again after figuring out he's not stupid.
That is why the dev found a new publisher and put out a "new" game, pretty sure it's a legal angle that the new publisher won't get anything if they fund development of this version or the old dev not technically selling rights to spintires. No idea, but do not blame the dev. If you already own this like I do, yeah, it sucks either accept it and get the new version or stick to modding this. If you don't, avoid this version, get the new one, the new publisher isn't retarded and there is supposed to be new maps and trucks along with better controls and good mod support. Hopefully steam kills this version before anyone falls into the trap.

Crawling through mud agonizingly slowly with big Russian trucks is a lot more fun than you'd expect