RoadCraft is another unique entry from Saber Interactive, offering the opportunity to create a company from scratch and rebuild the world around you. There’s a clever blend of weather and construction, and needing to adapt to ever changing scenarios to restart the local industry. A lot of systems like damage and fuel were vaulted for accessibility, but that has come at a cost. RoadCraft is certainly niche, but it’s first one of these that felt that the work wasn’t worth the reward.
SnowRunner was the epitome “it’s about the journey, not the destination” as you navigated extremely rough terrain to complete objectives. Expeditions: A MudRunner Game straddled a line between accessibility and wanting to be a pseudo-sequel to SnowRunner, as it focusing on doing science things while going over rough terrain. Now we are at RoadCraft, a game that further strays from where we started with SnowRunner, running a construction company that helps make the rough terrain, smooth. And like the work you’re doing, the gameplay suffers from a lack of challenge.
The story begins with you forming a company who specializes in restoration after natural disasters like floods and sandstorms occur. As it so happens, you’re dispatched to an area that’s about to be hit by a huge flood. The game does a good job at teaching you about everything from traversing, creating uninterrupted supply lines, and how to use each piece of equipment. You spend the tutorial preparing for said flood and there’s so many introductions to systems, mechanics, and controls that it can get overwhelming quickly.
There are seven maps to the game, each with a preferred path and some open-ended choices. You’ll start in the tutorial with “Precipice”, a sandy port town and then move on to “Aftermath”, the same location altered by a flood. From there you have the choice to go to “Incommunicate” or “Sunken”. At that point you can go to “Deluge”, “Sojeurn”, or “Sandswept”. When one of those is completed, you can access the final map of “Kernel”. Through each of these areas, you’ll traverse forests and mountains, deserts, and highlands in visually stunning locales both about to be and having been ravaged by nature.
As a point of fact, it took me 90 minutes just to get past the first level of the game. And that’s not the entirety of the tutorial, but this should help set expectations around how long each map or mission takes. This is still a game that offers anywhere from 80 to 100 hours of content, and I haven’t seen it all.
RoadCraft is often fiddly, where the controls are cumbersome. You’ll be asked to do a lot of vehicle swapping to complete your main and side objectives. What I think is a great feature, is the fact that resources have to get around the map, and you’ll have to create supply lines. In a lot of ways, this is like an automated SnowRunner. Unfortunately the game automates the more interesting things, and leaves you to manually perform the unfun work. Which is an underbaked idea, as you’re the CEO of a company, doing essentially all of the hard work yourself instead of having others complete it. The game often doesn’t make sense in this regard, as it wants you to have direct control of things.
I’m not sure why Saber Interactive insists on doing this with every new game, but RoadCraft‘s control scheme is once again completely different from the game that came before it. When you’re driving a vehicle, it feels so stoic as there’s no physics or bounce that we’ve been accustomed to with how suspensions worked before. It’s also worth noting that there’s no fuel to concern yourself with, or damage that can occur to vehicles (aside from water logging your engine). RoadCraft focuses on completing objectives, and makes traversal is an obstacle where it shouldn’t be. There’s a talking lady in your ear to guide you along, and is rather lame and largely unneeded. RoadCraft also uses the same driver model as SnowRunner, so there are these moments where things feel recycled when they shouldn’t be feeling wholly new.
The activities and work you’re performing is more interesting than in Expeditions: A MudRunner Game. There’s simply more to do, environmental puzzles to solve, efficiencies to perfect, and tools at your disposal. You’ll have machines for tree clearing, stump pulling, cranes to carry heavy walls, and transporting resources. Then there’s bulldozing and actual roadcrafting by laying sand, smoothing out terrain, and dropping asphalt. You become a jack-of-all-trades, but a master-of-none as there’s simply so much going on.
You’ll amass a fleet of vehicles consisting of dozers, cranes, scouts, actual roadcrafters, and special vehicles that do things like restore power or remove tree stumps. You’ll be able to customize your vehicles in your garage, and outfit them as you’d like. As you earn money from completing objectives, you can visit the shop to add more to your company’s fleet. Doing so will mean that you’ll add versatility to complete certain jobs better, or faster. Investing in yourself will always pay off.
As with prior games, RoadCraft continues the tradition of online co-op for up to four players to split up the tasks. And for the first time, progression is shared for all players. This is a huge boon to wanting to play in co-op, unless you’re gonna play with the same host all the time. It’s something I wish would be in all previous games, retroactively.
While this was inactive for me during the review period, the game does include a Mod Browser. What’s arguably the lifeblood of a game to help make the game more “your own”, and allow you to add features to the game that aren’t part of the vanilla experience.
I was able to set everything to set to Ultra or their max setting, and I was getting about 140fps on average. I had enabled DLSS 3 + Frame Generation to aid this. And this was with the 4K textures installed (a FREE DLC), as well. RoadCraft looks great during rain and sandstorms, but incredibly crisp during non-weather states as well. The new engine powering this game is noticeable and incredibly performant.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
Ultimately, the challenge just isn’t there for RoadCraft, and it’s just a shame as the series deviates from what made it so special. The activities and missions you do are by far the best in the series, which makes this game worth it. Longtime fans will find this to be a game that’s demands too much work, especially for how fiddly everything is. RoadCraft is a construction and restoration sim that makes it difficult to find the fun.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
