RoadCraft Review - A Builder's Woe

Skip To...

If there’s one review that needs a disclaimer with neon signs, trumpets, and the most apparent indicators, it is this one. Why? RoadCraft is not SnowRunner 2, and I must make that as straightforward as possible before I talk more about Saber Interactive‘s new venture. Is it still an engaging game? It will be debatable for many, as this is the niche of niches. Does that make it bad? Not at all. RoadCraft has pretty interesting mechanics, superb physics, and excellent driving systems. Still, it can be highly frustrating for solo players. It features a less-than-ideal UI for some things, and unless you’re deeply into heavy machinery and building gameplay, you won’t enjoy this one that much.

RoadCraft steers away from everything we saw in SnowRunner, which can be good or bad for some. As we know, Saber Interactive has been great at pumping out games with realistic driving mechanics and immersive gameplay loops. In that sense, RoadCraft follows suit. It has so many perfectly crafted systems that are a feat on their own. Still, it has to be one of the least friendly games for solo players I’ve ever experienced. Add to that a clunky UI with not-so-approachable controls, and you might feel more frustrated than rewarded as you play.

Road Stranding

Oddly enough, when I was playing RoadCraft, SnowRunner was the last thing that came to mind. Instead, I thought of Death Stranding, minus the babies and blood grenades. In RoadCraft, you take the role of a construction company manager. What’s your job? Head to places Mother Nature has ravaged and restore them one pile of sand at a time.

The reason why it reminded me so much of Death Stranding was because of that premise. You’re someone trying to reconnect places by delivering resources, rebuilding roads, and even restoring energy to a whole town. In that regard, it feels great, and it is truly rewarding once you look back and see that all the frustrating bits have paid off. There’s even a function that lets you analyze the terrain and shows you the easiest way to traverse it, similar to Sam’s Odradek. But that’s as far as comparisons go.

Regarding the moment-to-moment gameplay, you have a huge fleet of vehicles. You start with a few scouting trucks and get heavy machinery that allows you to break the ground and install cables to transport energy from one place to another. RoadCraft does an excellent job of making you feel like a fleet leader. The more missions you complete, the more money and ranks you get to purchase even better vehicles. It has a light management portion that I enjoyed because it never distracted me from the building segments, which are the bread and butter.

Another notable thing about RoadCraft is its map design. While the first two occur in the same location and serve as a huge tutorial, the campaign branches into different scenarios. Even if there aren’t many levels, each one is deep enough to offer you hours of sandbox building. I spent roughly three hours on each of the early maps. However, I also skipped a few side objectives and didn’t want to put in the extra work to restore some roads or build a new bridge.

RoadCraft nails immersion, which is expected from Saber Interactive. In that sense, I can only praise what RoadCraft tries to achieve, even if it’s vastly different from other titles by these developers. However, there are a few core gameplay issues that really discouraged me as time went on. I slowly noticed that this game, while great in many aspects, feels like a song you hear on the radio playing over and over. You either listen to it so much that you like it or end up turning the radio off; there’s no middle ground.

Not Suitable for Solo Players

Since RoadCraft immerses you in a building fleet management simulator with a lot of building aspects, you’ll spend a lot of time driving dozens of vehicles from all brands, sizes, and functions. Naturally, the game features co-op to bring a few friends and help you in your restoration endeavors. However, I spent all of my time playing alone, and I kid you not, it was highly frustrating.

The first missions in RoadCraft are pretty straightforward. You find a location, clear some rubble, put some sand on the ground, send convoys from point A to point B, and that’s it. However, things get a bit more complicated as time goes on. Some maps need you to build roads. To do so, you need to use at least four vehicles. You have your dump truck that places the sand, the bulldozer that flattens said sand, one vehicle that lays down asphalt, and a final one that flattens it all to create a brand-new road. Sometimes, this process is automated, and I couldn’t be more thankful. Yet, if you want to go out of your way to build a road outside of a main or side objective, you must do everything manually.

Some people will enjoy this. As I’ve said, the realism in the driving mechanics is superb. However, doing four different tasks with four different vehicles that sometimes struggle with the physics engine can be too much.

For instance, in one objective, I had to replace broken pipes. For that, I had to load up the new pipes on a truck first and drive them to the location needing repairs. Then, I had to drive my crane all the way there. In the process, my truck with the pipes hit the smallest rock on the map. I wasn’t even going off-road. I was following the path I fixed and bumped into this tiny little rocky thing. My truck flipped over, and my pipes flew away. I was able to respawn my vehicle at my base, but I had to go all the way back for my pipes.

That’s not the worst part, though. The worst thing was that I had to move my crane down to where the pipes were alongside the truck to fix everything and get back on track. I can’t believe I will say this, but RoadCraft needs to nerf rocks if that’s such a thing. And before you tell me, “Oh, you should’ve planned your route better.” Some rocks spawn out of nowhere, and some are even floating. I want to believe it is a hiccup on the physics engine part. But sadly, it ruined many of my tasks and forced me to step away from my campaign for a few minutes.

In truth, all of these things would’ve been way better with other friends. While you and someone else are going to fix pipes, you can ask others to help you create a new road or fix a bridge. However, as a solo player, this process becomes highly tedious. Yes. It might be part of the game’s charm. But there are players out there who enjoy doing things on their own, and RoadCraft doesn’t cater to that at all. Fortunately, a few automated tasks can make your life easier. But if you mess up one small thing or get hit by a physics glitch, you’ll lose minutes of progress and have to start again on your own.

Everything’s a Puzzle

Solo play frustration aside, one thing I found interesting was how RoadCraft presents everything as a puzzle. When driving from one point to another, you must carefully plan your route. Suppose your dump truck passed through a wet road and accidentally created a ditch. If you drive through it, your car will get stuck. Ironically, I liked this aspect. I often asked myself, “Should I drive through here, find a better road, or build a road?” I usually floored it and prayed it worked because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of building something alone. Still, it was interesting to see how elaborate the maps were and how they presented a challenge, even when moving from one area to the next.

The same happens with loading up resources. Most of the time, you’ll have to carry slabs, pipes, and other objects for your projects. To get them to the project area, you need to load them up first. You can use a crane most of the time, and stacking resources at the back of a truck becomes an unexpected Jenga game. At one point, I wanted to see how stacked my vehicle could be. I placed as many pipes and slabs as possible, and the car flipped over. Still, it was interesting to see how far I could go.

Despite my complaints, I think the innate puzzle aspect is excellent. It makes you think outside of the box most of the time. And the great thing is that there isn’t only one solution to most of the map’s issues. If you want to go through a wet road, hook your winch to a rock and pull yourself. Is the winch giving you trouble? Throw some sand on the road and flatten it. RoadCraft has excellent sandbox mechanics that put player agency first. A few might be a hassle, but I was always glad to have many options to make things less tedious.

Let’s Get Physical

Another big selling point of RoadCraft is its physics engine. In short, it is great, albeit a bit wonky. However, we know that everything that involves realistic physics in a game or an engine that relies heavily on that will always be weird. Fortunately, it doesn’t reach Skyrim levels, but it still has a few bumps here and there.

Almost everything in RoadCraft is there to be moved around. Some objects can even be recycled to get new items to patch roads or other locations. The most surprising part of the game, however, is its roads. At first, you only see a few environmental hazards—wet roads, deep water, etc. If your car goes through any of those roads, it might mess them up. The next vehicle that passes through it will have a harder time on them, and so on. Also, I noticed how when it rains, which is almost every five minutes, roads get wet and affect movement in real-time, which was surprising.

The one thing that made me livid, and I don’t use that word lightly, was the physics of rocks. I’m aware that not all heavy-duty vehicles can destroy rocks or pass on top of them effortlessly. Still, some had the size of a pebble and were enough to flip my gigantic crane over. It became frustrating.

Winch physics was a whole other ordeal. In some cases, the winch worked perfectly. It helped me pull a few objects and even drag them to a location. In other cases, I ended up flipping vehicles as I tried to get them on top of a transportation truck or losing cargo because the winch would go nuts as I shortened its length. Yet, it didn’t frustrate me as much as the rocky roads of the game, but it still was an issue I couldn’t look past.

Only for Dedicated Builders

Overall, RoadCraft feels like the mother of all niche games, and I don’t say that in a bad way. People who love fixing roads, realistic vehicle physics, and strategic driving will have a blast. Even if driving has been dumbed down considerably compared to other Saber Interactive titles, it still was enjoyable, mainly because RoadCraft knows what it wants to be: an in-depth sandbox simulator with an emphasis on heavy-duty vehicles and a slow gameplay loop. In that regard, it shines brightly and will allure many players who’ve been waiting for a game like this.

Still, it feels highly inaccessible for solo players and suffers from a few UI issues, glitches, bugs caused by the physics engine, and more. The silver lining is that they don’t ruin the experience, as there are many salvageable things in RoadCraft. Yet, I found my time managing my fleet and restoring places more frustrating than enjoyable. But with all the bumps and ravaged roads, RoadCraft still has a unique charm, and it will fall into the “you either love it or hate it” category.

RoadCraft (PC Reviewed)

7.5 Very Good

RoadCraft is one of the most niche games out there. It offers an unmatched sandbox building experience with an emphasis on realistic driving, but it suffers from many glitches and bugs and is also one of the least solo-friendly games out there.