Following in the ground-breaking footsteps of SnowRunner and MudRunner, Roadcraft from Sabre Interactive tasks you with rebuilding areas that have been devastated by natural disaster. Taking control of an array of vehicles, including hefty 4×4 jeeps, mobile cranes, tree cutters with terrifying rusty saw blades straight out of Mad Max and asphalt rollers, you’ll be living out the childhood fantasy of commanding huge machines to rip and tear at the landscape in an effort to restore order and infrastructure to this ravaged open-world map.
In this preview, I’ve played through three scenarios, each offering its own trials and tribulations to overcome. The first, marked down as “easy” (which I’m not sure that I totally agree with) sees you fixing an electricity grid. Starting off straight-forward enough driving a Scout vehicle to the power station, it’s a task in itself to get from A-to-B. The landscape varies from gravel roads to swampy wetlands, a maze of boulders and fallen trees. To aid in your task, you are equipped with a scanner that marks out the difficulty of the terrain in your vicinity, green being good to go, and red indicating impassable obstacles. It’s finding a way through that becomes a problem.
Deep mud and even deeper puddles can soon hinder your progress, but you do have a few tricks up your hi-vis sleeve. Vehicles have a number of operating modes such as a low gear to provide more traction, a four wheel drive capability and, in the Scout’s case, a winch should you need to drag yourself out of a particularly sticky situation. This is a slow paced game, which oddly reminded me of PowerWash Simulator. It’s the methodical manner in which Roadcraft asks you to progress, taking your time to find the best way to complete a task, almost a meditation in optimisation. Or maybe it’s just all the filth and grime.
Later in this mission, you’ll be felling trees and chewing up stumps with the Rusty Stump Mulcher, making way for the Log Forwarder to come in and grab your harvested resources. It’s at this point that I found myself having to get to grips with a more complicated control scheme, with most of the buttons on the controller being used in some way to manipulate a crane arm, picking up felled logs, before manoeuvring them onto the back of the vehicle and strapping them down for the journey. It was oddly compelling and frustrating in equal measure having to utilise a skill set that I’ve not used before, logs getting jammed against the cab or boom arm as you try to swing them into position. Whilst a few expletives may have been uttered, it was oh so satisfying to finally secure the load and be en-route to the depot for unloading.
The world itself is dynamic, with weather changing to help or hinder you on a regular basis. Your sense of place in this world was one of my favourite things about my time with this preview. With the wind whistling through the branches and rain lashing against the windscreen as you reverse around a particularly awkward pond, it’s a genuinely immersive experience and I’d recommend playing as much of this in the first person perspective as you can.
Cooperative play is encouraged with up to four players taking control of rebuilding behemoths, a sure-fire way of destroying friendships as you smash pipes into each other and attempt to drive over your colleagues rather than around them. Whilst I’m pretty sure that it’s not the intention, there’s plenty of opportunity for comedy as you berate each other for being completely inept at driving a cable laying truck.
So far, then, Roadcraft seems like a niche game designed for a niche market. But if you have ever enjoyed the complexities of Sabre Interactive’s previous vehicular based games then you’ll be sure to love this latest release. I’d recommend giving this a go if you’ve even the slightest spark of interest. Who knows, Roadcraft might even become the gateway to your new favourite genre?
Roadcraft is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X on May 20th.
