RoadCraft is the video game equivalent of playing in a sandbox with a bunch of bright yellow diggers and trucks. Sure, it’s got its roots in the often torturous terrain traversal of the MudRunner series, but once you get into the swing of the reconstruction tasks it sets you, it really starts to feel like you’re a big kid and your mates have come round to play.
Of course, there’s no need to really engage your imagination here, conjuring up mental imagery of imagined disasters, or making mechanical or engine noises as you smash plastic into sand or dirt – RoadCraft has all these bases covered.
We played an opening scenario featured in the new Steam Next Fest demo – available for all from 24th February – dropping into a region that has been devastated by a tornado rolling through – how inconvenient! The power is out, the roads are flooded, and the terrain is only just the right side of a boggy swamp.
The first job is figuring out that you need to disengage the handbrake on your 4×4, and turn on AWD and split diff so that you can actually drive places without spinning your wheels deeper and deeper into the mud. Also, I inadvertently hooked my tow cable to a tyre and was dragging that around for five minutes before realising why I was randomly veering to the right – Look, it’s my first time actually playing these games, but I did eventually catch up to Dom, who knows his MudRunners like the back of his muddy hands.
Once we finally reached the first objective, picking our way through the woods and skirting flood waters, we got stuck in with the meaty terrain-altering vehicles that the game puts at your disposal. Swapping between vehicles from the world map is about as seamless as it gets, at which point you can dive straight into the task at hand – this first job being to clear an area of trees and stumps to make way for future work.
I forget their actual names, but for this one job we had to make use of Choppy the tree murderer, who can effortlessly cut a tree, spin it on its side and then “process” it into a single log, making way for Stumpy the tree stump muncher to come along and just mulch whatever was left sticking out of the ground. Finally, Grabby the… grabber lorry was on hand to come and pick up the logs and take them back to base on his trailer.
Stumpy was by far and away the most direct, with Choppy being similarly decent to get to grips with as you drive to the right position and then trigger his super effective tree murdering attack when the highlight turns green. Grabby, though…. let’s just say that Grabby actually needs you to be able to visualise the relative movement of his arm in 3D space, calculate some angular motion, and is prone to the waggly whims of a dangling mass of wood. It’s a real faff, in other words, but you do get used to it and shifting the camera to a top-down view helps a lot.
The second goal was where this all really started to shine. With a goal to power up and restore a concrete plant, we got to work figuring out the best route to take to this part of the map with our newly unlocked Kay Blur the cable layer – by this point we’d waved away a good chunk of the ‘fog of construction’ obscuring the landscape – and figuring out what we needed to use to get there. Again, there’s no simple road or clear path to take, and with the size of Kay and her laying apparatus, it quickly became clear that we’d need to take Choppy and Stumpy with us.
So began a half hour trek across the map, hopping back and forth between the vehicles and gradually clearing a path for Kay to take. I’ve said it already, but it really did bring to mind that kind of singular vision and clear focus of playing with construction toys to tackle some imagined goal. It was a lot of fun with two of us going at the task, and I can only imagine the kind of coordinated efforts that four could apply in co-op.
That mission complete, we came to the end of the demo on this map – the demo features three maps and scenarios – but this unlocked some further toys that you can play with. In particular, it opens up the possibility to actually start laying roads, using a dump truck to drop a steady bed of sand before laying tarmac and then flattening it out. There’s also a bridge that would been a concrete slab putting in place and more.
This really feels like the next logical step after MudRunner, SnowRunner and Expeditions. You still have the foundational vehicular gameplay that proved to be a hit with so many players, and there’s some of the advancements from Expeditions, like having the terrain scanner to lean on. Applying this to a reconstruction scenario and with more deeply ingrained co-op feels like a perfect fit.
Really the only sticking point I can see for newcomers to the series is your mentality as a player, just as with the earlier games. There is that inherently torturous set of vehicle physics as you have to drag yourself through deep mud and water at points, which can be rather frustrating at times, and having to go back and get a slower vehicle for a job halfway across the map could easily be a 30 minute job with misadventures along the way. I’m sure this is as heretical to suggest as an easy mode for Dark Souls, but an option to lift away some of the drudgery with a quick-switching element as in The Crew 2 could just elevate that sandbox play. Of course, you don’t want to lose that inherent charm of playing and collaborating in co-op.
Coming out in May, the full game will feature eight large maps, over 40 vehicles, and a campaign that lets you build up your own building company to handle all manner of disasters around the world. For now, check out the demo on Steam when it arrives next Monday.
