RoadCraft preview: Build back better

When RoadCraft was announced last summer, it immediately grabbed the Traxion team’s attention. 

It appeared to combine the exploration of its immensely successful predecessor Snowrunner (and to a lesser extent, 2024’s Expeditions: A MudRunner Game), with the heavy plant appeal of a Diggerland theme park (seriously, it’s a place where the general public can operate diggers, dump trucks and excavators, it’s incredible).

It seemed to appeal to gamers looking for a zen-like experience, exploring eight 4km2 areas beset by environmental or man-made disasters. Your job? To rebuild, armed only with a variety of heavy machinery and Saber’s advanced physics engine.

A demo of RoadCraft will be available to play when Steam NextFest kicks off on the 24th of February, but we’ve been given access to an early version of the game. Most of the content has been specially curated for this build, so the final game experience may differ.

The question is, will RoadCraft’s diverse game mechanics complement or detract from the series’ renowned driving model?

Can’t see the wood for the trees

Much of RoadCraft’s gameplay will be familiar to players of the MudRunner series. The way vehicles drive and react to the environment is typically realistic, as are the visuals; it’s a game that grittily replicates its landscapes.

In the case of this demo, woodland, desert and mountainous areas are available, pitched separately as ‘Easy’, ‘Challenging’ and ‘Hard’ levels.

Starting out, we’re treated to the first glimpse of the game’s tree harvester vehicle. This grabs, chops and then processes trees into usable lumber. The accompanying animations are delightful but I wish the camera was more malleable to get a proper close-up view.

The stump mulcher is massively satisfying to use too, churning away at evil tree stumps which have been the bane of many a MudRunner player over the years. By using a combination of these vehicles it’s possible to clear a safe path to your next objective; the only limit is how much time you want to spend doing it. 

Loading up the logs is a tad more frustrating, however, as the mobile crane is a bit of a faff to control, but the subsequent trip across boggy roads is classic MudRunner.

I hope any changes you make to the landscape carry through the main campaign; it would seem ridiculous to allow players to put in so much effort only to see it reset after every mission.

Laying cable

The first environment also introduces the cable layer, which digs a trench and drops an electricity cable as it drives. This was quite awkward to manoeuvre I found, especially as the most obvious path was through dense woodland and would require several hours of deforestation to clear. I didn’t get stuck once, however, as I was able to scout a path using my nippier Land Rover Defender facsimile.

Happily, the 4×4 feels great to drive through light mud, although its high-speed handling is a little skittish. Thankfully, most of RoadCraft’s vehicles are slower-moving than your local council’s pothole-filling department.

On the beach

The demo’s second location is a desert-style landscape. It’s beset by sandstorms which highlights the game’s dynamic weather system but there’s no day-to-night cycle. It can get quite gloomy, which ramps up the bleakness of the disaster-ridden maps, with rain showers adding an edge to the more splodgy sections of maps.

Using a large mobile crane to clear a path of debris highlights the game’s physics perfectly. More than once, I hooked onto objects and swung them out of the road like a pendulum just because I could. It was pretty fun but could cause collateral damage in the game’s v1.0 release.

Where we’re going, we do need roads

The next order of business is to BUILD AN ACTUAL ROAD. Yes, the stand-out feature from the game’s first two trailers is playable in the demo and it’s brilliant.

Road-building in RoadCraft‘s demo is partly automated. A section of road is assigned for rebuilding and you select vehicles to work on it. Firstly, get a dump truck to deposit sand along the route, use a bulldozer to grade it and then get your paver to lay some asphalt.  You can then complete the job with a spot of rolling.

It looks cool in action: it’s like when I played with giant Tonka toys in my twenties nursery days. You can manually take over the road building yourself, which is key to the appeal of RoadCraft. I couldn’t build roads on the other maps, however, so it’ll be interesting to see how freeform this mechanic will be in v1.0.

Finishing this road allows AI convoys to travel between depots, with you placing map markers to set their route. Typically, they drive more like Taki Inoue than Lewis Hamilton and seem to find obstacles where there are none. It takes a little fettling to amend the route but it’s straightforward enough.

The long and winding RoadCraft

The third and most difficult environment to negotiate has been adversely affected by flooding after a fracking incident, so almost all its roads are impassable. But this creates more opportunities to use RoadCraft’s range of heavy plant.

The first task is to locate, deliver and fit a valve to fix a broken pipeline. Easy. You drive to a scrapyard, use a giant crane to drop the valve into your transporter (the giant crane uses different controls to the mobile crane, frustratingly) and teeter off to your destination.

Except all the roads are destroyed, making it impossible. I have a brainwave though; I decide to use a dump truck, with its infinite supplies of sand, to fill in all the deep pools of water hampering my progress. It’s laborious work (if I wasn’t sitting in a comfy chair sipping herbal tea, that is), but I manage to fill in the main routes. A quick flatten with a bulldozer and my rudimentary roads are ready.

And they work beautifully, easing my progress to my goal. Until I roll my truck while scaling a hillside. Ah.

But this is what really got me hooked on RoadCraft; that ability to carve the landscape to your requirements. Using the resources available I was able to chart my own course to the mission objectives, which is just as well because the game isn’t really one for hand-holding.

Two sections of pipe need to be replaced too, which warrants more problem-solving. I end up dumping several tons of sand to make pipe salvaging easier, with my rusty bulldozer used to make the newly created surface drivable. Awesome stuff.

Teamwork makes the dream work

The game’s four-player co-op mode was also playable in the demo, and the Traxion team got a brief chance to try it out.

Pleasingly, it was a seamless experience with two players, with Traxion’s John Munro able to jump into my single-player game and test out all the modifications I’d made to each of the demo’s environments.

Our short test of RoadCraft’s multiplayer highlighted the high potential of this mode, with hilarity ensuing as our vehicles inevitably ended up in ditches. But multiplayer can also speed up your progress in-game, as team Traxion streamlined the process of dumping and grading sand to turn impassable sections into ramshackle roads. 

I’m certain that co-op multiplayer will be the easiest and most entertaining way to play RoadCraft when it releases; I just hope any changes you make to a map carry through as you progress through the game.

End of the road

Overall, this early demo build of RoadCraft is massively encouraging. As a relative newcomer to Saber Interactive’s off-roading series, I found the driving to be engaging, with just enough simulation elements (diff locks ahoy!) to be believable.

But, crucially, it’s also fun.

Using the game’s array of heavy machinery is largely intuitive (mobile cranes aside) and the brief look at the demo’s three environments makes me optimistic that RoadCraft will strike a chord with players more than Expeditions did.

There’s a lot of variety here, and the game empowers you to create your own solutions to problems, which is key to a satisfying gaming experience. The cooperative multiplayer is a genuine revelation, too.

There are very few issues with RoadCraft as it stands; its performance was excellent with only a few minor graphic glitches but I was unfortunately unable to get my Moza wheel to work. My gut feeling is that RoadCraft will play better with a gamepad anyway, mostly due to the number of actions you need to perform concurrently.

We’ll find out for sure when the game releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on the 20th of May. Judging from this early build, there’s a lot to be excited about.

Now, I’m off to fill in some more potholes.

RoadCraft’s free demo will be available on PC as part of Steam Next Fest on the 24th of February.

Do you like the look of RoadCraft? Let us know in the comments below.