Over the Hill, a rather chillaxed take on brutal Saber Interactive off-roading sims like SnowRunner, is the latest game from vibesy driving enthusiasts Funselektor. The folks behind the likes of Art of Rally and Absolute Drift have assembled untamed wildernesses in the cold Canadian hills and the boiling desert of Algeria, before handing myself and Julian the keys to some 4x4s. Here’s our verdict.
Mark: Right, I’m getting to the top of the snowy peak this time. You just watch me. My Unimog-shaped behemoth of an off-roader, imbued with the finest tech the Germans can devise for making short work of any terrain, is nearly fully upgraded. It can get me there. I will not end up rolling down a whole mountain again, the roof of my near-indestructible half-lorry/half-jeep bouncing off the rocks like a pebble being lobbed down the Grand Canyon.
I’m gonna use my little poles to winch myself up and use my jack to put myself back on my wheels if I fall over. I will not end up wedged helplessly between two stone ledges again, engine roaring in futile fury. I am going t- crap, I’ve taken too much speed round a bend and tumbled off a cliff towards the valley below. Have you fared similarly, Julian?
Julian: I want to say that my many hours of Spintires, SnowRunner, and MudRunner have left me in good stead, but while driving the first challenge trail I discovered in Over the Hill, I was pootling along a lakeside waterfall with too little care, clipped a rocky outcrop and ended up wedged between two rocks with my engine rapidly filling with water. I'd like to say that was the one and only time I made that mistake, but there is a joyous bounce to Over the Hill's offroading that can also make fools of us all. I can't help but pick up speed as I drive down a mountain trail. I should switch into a lower gear, take my time, maybe assess the path before descending, but where's the fun in that? So, quite a few times now, I've found myself wedged between a couple of rocks, the wheels of my dinky 4x4 roaring but finding no grip.
For the most part, those failures haven't been too painful. Restarting back at a nearby campsite rarely means too long a drive back to where I lost control. Though, when wedged, I would prefer a few more toys to get unstuck – all too often there's no nearby tree to wrap a winch around. This will reveal how much further into the game you are than me, but I've not unlocked the jack or poles yet. I'm still making do with the starting winch (though I've upgraded the cable length with the points I've earned for exploring most of the starting region).
Do they change things substantially?
Mark: As soon as you’re able, investing in more gadget slots for your ride is a must. Since you earn upgrade points through discovering objectives while exploring the world, and interacting with them in whichever way is offered, you do have to get by early with just a single tool slot. As such, you’ve only got one jack or portable winch point to whip out if you get into a jam and, as you’ve outlined, there’s not always a friendly tree nearby to help out. There are four slots in total once you’ve bought them all and provided whatever tool you fill each of them with does get you past one obstacle or back on the road after one miscalculation, that essentially gives you four lives to use until you’ve got to consider resetting to the nearest camp. Naturally, if you’re like me and your first fall is all the way down a mountain, you might need to head back for repairs anyway.
It certainly keeps you on your toes, despite Over the Hill’s otherwise friendlier vibes than its tougher inspirations. I think the thing that keeps the former feeling less like Driving Dark Souls is the fact it keeps things admirably simple from a mechanical perspective. You’ve got the option of sticking in the high gear setting to go fast, or the low setting to more easily grind up hills without excess wheelspin, but there’s no shuffling about between a bunch of settings, having to remember to engage your locking diffs, or needing to worry about running out of fuel before you reach your next stop.
Those are all key to the in-depth simulation the likes of SnowRunner are going for, but doing away with them lessens the learning curve required to get to grips with Over the Hill. It also means you don’t have to worry that the solution you’re looking for, when you run into a patch of terrain you can’t scale, is something nestled deep in your ride’s Haynes manual. Then again, having to leaf through that might mean more time spent enjoying the scenery before beelining towards the next camp.
Julian: I've found myself loving the simplicity in some moments and yearning for the complexity in others. When I first started, I selected manual transmission, thinking it would add a little more challenge to what looks like a simple game. I turned it off pretty quickly, though. It made the driving a little too taxing and drew me out of the zen vibes the outdoorsy locale were fostering. That said, I wonder if it might benefit from a fuel gauge? I want something to drag me back to camp every now and then.
I'm also missing a couple of other MudRunner steadfasts, like deformable terrain. Without seeing your wheels kick up mud and gouge their way into the earth, there feels like a bit of a disconnect between your vehicle and the terrain. The lo-fi aesthetic makes that disconnect from the land a little more pronounced.
Though, I don't know about you, but the chill vibes are helping me treat the Over the Hill more playfully. I've been using the quick winch – which snags the nearest tree in range with a tap of the Y button – a little like a 4WD Spider-Man. A Spider-Van, if you will. I'll anchor myself to a sapling at the top of a cliff, reverse backwards and extend the cable to lower myself down the precipice. When I'm fully extended, I'll let go and cling to any trees I pass on the way down, using them to slow my fall.
Mark: The terrain gets a lot soupier if you get caught in snowfall on one of the Canada maps, or wade into the sandy dunes beyond the rocky mesas of the Algeria maps. There have been a couple of times I’ve hit pause or rested at a cabin to let a bit of time pass, then gone to pull away and found my jeep buried waist-deep in snow. The mud’s unquestionably not as treacherous as Saber’s, but I’ve found the car flipping and beeching tendencies of angular rocks just as potent as they are in any tougher sims.
One concern I have had is that after unlocking the vehicle I outlined in the intro, dubbed Das Mammoth, I’ve found it so suited to overcoming most obstacles that I fear I might not tap any of the other rides I’ve unlocked for ventures to uncharted territories. There may yet turn out to be narrow paths it proves too bulky for, but up to now I’ve amassed a garage of about eight jeeps (from taking on the challenge trails that set out checkpoint routes through tricky stretches of landscape) and none of them seem to match its elite ground clearance. Then again, I did acquire it via a task fairly deep into the third - and hardest to negotiate - of the Canada maps, so may just have lucked into picking up one of the best vehicles relatively quickly.
That’s also, admittedly, a criticism only grounded in my early hours with old-school Land Rover Defender and Ford Bronco-shaped jeeps, so the classic American pickup and wood-panneled station wagon I’ve unlocked (but not had much of a go with yet) may fare better. I have found it a tad frustrating, just in terms of the game pushing you to try out a new car when you unlock it, that upgrades you buy can’t be transferred between vehicles. That means every fresh addition’s got to be tuned up from scratch, leaving me reluctant to take them on treks into the unknown right away. There are bears out there, after all!
Julian: I worry I've come across as a tad negative, but I've really enjoyed pootling about the landscape. After playing Prospice last week, I'm also loving this fresh abundance of off-road sims of different stripes – be that chill vibes or eldritch limb transport. It's also wonderful to have something this pick-up-and-put-downable on the Steam Deck. While sat in the office and James' back is turned, I can hop in for a brief sojourn into the woods [Get back to work - James].
I would flag, if you plan on loading up your 4x4 and heading into the wilderness, that you have a camera and there are rewards for papping the wildlife. I realised this quite late and had missed out on pictures of deer, foxes, and all other sorts. Don't be me, scratching your noggin and trying to remember where you saw them hours after the fact.
Mark: I think it’s natural to be a bit drawn in by the desire to dash about discovering places early doors, rather than taking it slow enough to snap wildlife pics or collect meteorites that haven’t dropped right next to you. Those are bits of Over the Hill I’m hoping will keep me going with it, once I’ve begun running out of new areas to chart. I’ll certainly need something to aim for when I eventually park up Das Mammoth for an extended period and give the rest of my growing garage a proper run out.
The second Algeria map has some really striking ruins woven into the landscape, so I’ll likely spend some time snapping my camera to those too. I’m also keen to try out a bit of multiplayer roving whenever we can manage to co-ordinate an hour together [Get back to work - James].
Overall, my impression so far is that Over the Hill makes a worthy addition to the off-roading sim pantheon, with enough unique quirks to set it apart from the existing mudpluggers out there. I’m glad to see Funselektor keep trying new, albeit always car-related, things with each new game they put out. They’ve got a drift game, a rally game, a retro F1 management sim, and now Over the Hill. It’ll be interesting to see where they motor off to next.