*** Warning!! Long, but speaking from passion for the game and developers ***

First the good … The premise of this game is great and I did not totally dislike it. I took a chance and gave it a try. I was really only relegated to using it on the Steam Deck. Surprisingly it played ‘ok’ and it found and utilized my connected (docked) controller etc perfectly. After some dreadful initial loading slowness and single digit frame rates, once it settled down and off the back of the truck, the more open areas maintained around 20fps with default graphics settings (which was high+ as I recall). More tree or hilly areas would fluctuate from 10-20 and was a bit more of a struggle. Lowering some of the graphic detail to medium or less didn’t make a meaningful difference for me so I left it at default during my quick try prior to refund request.

The main issues FOR ME and also what I feared before trying were:
- Previous user made tracks disappear rather aggressively (I realize there is not infinite amount of memory to hold them), but worse, they actually HINDER the ride when trying to drive back in them! The physics for user made tracks just feel ‘off’ at best or non-useable at worse. This was actually a feature I was most looking forward to.
- I come from old 70’s/80’s era snowmobiling… I am very happy to see some more retro or older sleds included, but we drove predominantly on non-professionally groomed, self made trails through woods, paths, frozen lakes etc. So, as per above, the trails would have been made often just by you or your group or fellow snowmobilers prior until you got to open areas where you could cut loose a bit and more freely such as fields or lakes. This single path trail riding was very cathartic and relaxing… we were not X-factor hill climbing and jumping like appears to be the more ‘modern’ sledding focus.
- with all above, for me, the snow in-game was also just too deep and/or too powdery to really enjoy. From my, albeit historical, experience our sleds easily stayed on top of what snow we had (except for occasional extreme snow dumpings maybe) and did not sink as frequently or as easily as they do so far in this game. This really started to ruin or frustrate the experience for me.

I think the following would improve the experience for me:
- options to have globally less volume of snow or at least a ‘firmer’ state
- knowing that previous tracks can’t stay indefinitely on the map, as a possible alternative I would like to see various trails through the maps (especially wooded areas) that are somewhere between the included wide groomed road-like ones and what ones you can (briefly) make BUT have the physics for them be such that you can use them easily without sinking and working too hard at staying in them. These could lead to unique areas, discoverable, cabins, outposts etc.

I will definitely keep an eye on the progress of this game and maybe come back in the future or possibly even check out the console release as well or instead. I think I could tolerate the performance I had, even on the Steam Deck, with a little more optimization maybe as well the free roam ‘less to do’ nature currently etc. However I just am not as into the aggressive hill climbing and more extreme aspects currently portrayed in the game personally. I’m glad the options are there for those that desire this type of more extreme gameplay, but I was looking for some light, tight relaxing trail riding through old paths or woods roads on single sled trails that could be made and hopefully stay where the focus was rekindling that ‘old memory feeling’ I have of the sleds conforming to these single made trails - it was SO satisfying! I think this is what has captivated me so much with titles like MudRunner/SnowRunner. I’m hoping great success for this title and look forward to what may come. However I’m a bit afraid that unless it stays more extreme in nature, like it is, many would not be interested, so this may simply be the design decision of the game.

I still do recommend the title, despite its shortcomings for me personally and performance for where I had to play it on.

relatively good for there being no snowmobile games, i do love it, hopefully more sleds and modifications in the future?

This game makes a man go like "hell yeah!!". I highly recommend this game for almost everyone. Very fun to play and never gets bored. Just one thing this game needs a good GPU so otherwise this game wont run 60 fps at high settings. Overall very good.