I’m not much of a driving enthusiast, so I steered clear of Saber Interactive’s Mudrunner in 2017 and flaked out playing on Snowrunner in 2020. I like games where you do simulated jobs, though, and that’s what got me interested in RoadCraft, Saber’s new sim where industrial zones have been devastated by natural disasters and there’s only one way to set things right: by sending in a bunch of big ol’ trucks.
But there’s way more to RoadCraft than just crafting roads: you’ve gotta rebuild bridges, haul cargo, mend pipelines and lay powerlines, and even harvest resources like timber and scrap metal to be manufactured into new products for the repair effort.
I know that sounds like it’s a lot of slow, muddy, methodical work. And it is! But so far (I’m only on the third of eight maps in the full game) RoadCraft is also surprisingly chill and a great way to spend time with some friends in co-op.
Pave the world
Incursion into the disaster zones usually begins by driving a scouting vehicle that can navigate muddy and fractured roads to find a relatively safe route to factories, garages, and other locations that have become stranded like islands in a sea of fallen trees and muddy trails. With a route established, you can plot a course on the map for autonomous vehicles to follow to deliver supplies, and then adjust that route when the CPU-controlled drivers inevitably get stuck along the way.
To make things easier for your fleet and yourself, it’s time to engage in the prophesied crafting of roads. You can fill in broken roadways with sand via dumptruck, flatten the sand with a bulldozer, and then even cover it in asphalt with a paver and roller so it’s a proper road and not just a slightly less muddy dirt pile.
From your established base, you then explore deeper into the map and tread a path to new locations and objectives: haul concrete slabs needed to repair a bridge, operate a giant crane to move debris, or lay powerlines to replace broken connections between utility buildings. This all takes two things: lots of time and big-ass trucks.
There are side objectives, too, if you want to spend more time building and repairing instead of just rushing off to the next map. And if you’re playing co-op, there are plenty of other objectives you can invent yourself, like seeing if you can pick up your friends’ vehicles with a crane while they’re driving them.
You can. Morgan carried my scout around with his crane truck, and then I tried using my crane truck to pick up both Morgan and Lincoln’s vehicles at the same time. I didn’t quite succeed in that one.
At times RoadCraft requires precision: I thought I could sloppily load a cargo truck with steel beams and concrete slabs, but the physics of my poorly loaded truck meant it kept tipping over on the drive so I had to repeatedly and laboriously swap to my bulldozer and drive along the same route to push my truck back up on its four wheels. It took ages.
Mostly, though, RoadCraft feels downright forgiving. While craning a huge pipe into place on a broken pipeline, I only needed to get a portion of my replacement pipe in the right spot for the game to snap it perfectly into place. Also, muddy as those roads are, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten truly stuck to the point where I needed to reset my vehicle back to the garage. Morgan, who put hundreds of hours into Snowrunner, says mud is not as cruel a nemesis in Roadcraft, especially since new support vehicles function as mobile respawn points. What’s more common is, while trying to avoid a section of mud, I drive over some rough terrain and wind up rolling my truck.
And for a game about toiling in a disaster zone, RoadCraft is amazingly chill. It’s a great hangout game: tackling objectives with Morgan was low stress, and even playing on my own never felt frustrating, as I was sort of expecting considering the reputations of the earlier ‘runner games. Operating certain trucks is a bit tricky due to all the different control options (cranes, particularly, require the memorization of two modifier keys to operate), but with a bit of practice it’s a breeze.
This might not be the news hardcare driving fans want to hear. I found myself a little disappointed (in the early maps, at least) that building a new bridge simply consisted of dropping concrete slabs into a highlighted area rather than craning sections into place individually. I also understand earlier games like Snowrunner required you to manage your vehicles’ fuel and durability, almost like a survival game. That’s not necessary here: trucks are always fully fuelled and completely invulnerable.
That doesn’t mean RoadCraft is easy, especially when playing solo, which requires a lot of slow driving with multiple vehicles. Take this one mission where I had to complete all of these steps to satisfy a single objective:
- Drive along a pipeline in a scout vehicle to find the broken segments
- Use the scout’s winch to drag scrap metal to a recycling factory to manufacture new pipes
- Drive the crane truck to the factory, then drive the cargo truck to the factory
- Use the crane to load two large sections of pipe into the cargo truck
- Drive the cargo truck to broken pipeline, then drive the crane to the broken pipeline
- Use the crane to remove the broken segment of pipe
- Use the crane to lift the new pipe from the truck and into the pipeline
- Do those last three steps again at second section of broken pipe
It was slow work, and every out-of-place rock that wedged under my tire threatened to flip the truck and lose progress, but it was honestly a great, relaxing way to spend a couple hours. Completing it also let me afford a cargo/crane combo truck, so now I can pick stuff up and transport it with a single vehicle: that saved me a ton of time in the next map I played, which required me to collect a huge gas tank from one location and install it somewhere else.
Feels weird to say it, but if you’re looking for a completely chill game, consider this sim about bringing services to towns that have been devastated by floods and earthquakes. It’s muddy in there, sure, but you’ll spend most of your time relaxing, not spinning your wheels. RoadCraft releases May 20 on Steam.
Read the full article here
