2025 is shaping up to be a great year for gamers who love exploring desolate, post-apocalyptic wastelands while trying to bring civilisation back from the brink of disaster. Roadcraft bears more than a few similarities to Kojima’s masterpiece, having you pick your way across treacherous landscape using a terrain scanner and connecting settlements back onto the grid, but unlike Death Stranding it swaps babies in jars for diggers and trucks, giving you a realistic take on what the repair efforts might look like after a major geological disaster.
My first experience of Roadcraft was a bit of a disaster too. Loading into the opening biome in my truck I was immediately struck by how good the game looks. It shouldn’t have been a surprise as sims are often lookers, but Roadcraft really does look stellar. Saber Interactive has done a fantastic job at making these environments feel lived in without ever showing an NPC. Driving down into the valley and seeing flooding in the distance and bits of debris and foliage scattered across every road really drives home that something seriously bad has happened here.
Things took a wrong turn though when I got down to a flooded section of road. Using the terrain scanner I tried to pick my way across the more shallow sections but made a slight overturn and ended up in deep water (literally), flooding the engine. When this happens, simply holding up on the D-Pad will reset you back to a base or the opening of the level, so I just went back to the top of the hill and made my way back down, only to get stuck in the water again. This happened two more times before I got my head around the various drive modes to improve traction and stop slipping and finally passed through to the rest of the level where I could get stuck into helping bring civilisation back online.
This feels like a good analogy for how the rest of the game plays: you can’t just plough headfirst into every scenario. You need to plan your approach, think about the mission requirements and find a solution that’s going to meet them without getting you stuck in the mud. The first vehicle you get is your scout vehicle and it’s exactly that; it’s a comparably nippy vehicle equipped with scanners and a winch which you can use to get around the biome quickly, uncovering fog of war, and locating the various different facilities that are going to be required for the huge host of main and side missions available in each level.
Each biome is massive, and ranges from temperate forests full of muddy dirt trails to arid, dusty deserts you need to breathe life into. They’ve been hit by every natural disaster you can think of, short of alien invasion or Godzilla attack. As well as facilities to uncover, there’ll be obvious opportunities for new roads and bridges, construction yards you can purchase resources from, and additional bases you can set up through side missions.
Typically you’ll start off by driving your scout vehicle to your first base, which then acts as a garage for your vehicles and can store all the refined materials you generate over the course of the 30+ missions in each level. These range from building roads and setting up automated transport routes to run along them, to shifting debris with cranes, chopping down trees with forestry equipment, building sub-bases, laying underground electrical cabling and more. Working your way through sets of missions unlocks more, with an overarching aim for the entire level such as bringing the communication grid back online. Most of them directly focus on the construction elements of the gameplay, or require you to use them as part of your solution to the problem you’re presented with.
Take building roads, for example. This is a four step display of construction choreography:
- Choose your location and send in a dump truck to evenly coat the ground in sand
- Follow it up with a dozer to flatten it down and prep it for the next phase
- Bring in a paver to coat it with asphalt
- Finally, send in the big guns with the roller to slowly flatten it all again, leaving you with a compacted, drivable road
When you factor in getting all four of those vehicles from your garage to the place you want to build, it can be a time consuming process. It’s rewarding though, and I spent over an hour at one point building a road across a muddy bog which, although it took a while, was rewarding as it made it much quicker to get to certain parts of the map.
That said, the pacing can slow to a crawl at times if your only garage is on one side of the map and you need to build a road 2km away. There are ways to mitigate this though: setting up an additional base is an upfront time requirement but well worth it. There’s also a (very cool looking) mobile base you can move around the map, or you could add some friends into the mix and tackle the jobs in co-op.
You’ll also spend a lot of time in cranes and these can be some of the most frustrating moments in the game. They’re slow, unwieldy, and juggling the right stick, D-Pad, and shoulder buttons can become cumbersome. That said, it’s still incredibly satisfying when you use them proficiently. I was buzzing when I finally slotted a massive crate into my truck bed so snugly it looked purpose built for it.
Speaking of the truck, I want to give a shout out to the Mule T1. It’s a nippy little truck with a crane on top and while it doesn’t have the highest capacity or weight limit, that didn’t stop me loading it up well beyond either of those. It was my main workhorse throughout my time in the game and it’s a really fun vehicle to zip about in.
Most of the other vehicles seem to be more situational. There’s over 40 to unlock and they can be bought with points you earn by completing missions. You don’t get access to the full list immediately, they’re locked behind ranks but you quickly unlock better variants of the rusty old starting vehicles which makes life a lot easier. Additional vehicles include forestry equipment used to clear trees in the way of objectives or to generate wood resources, and cable-laying contraptions that look like they’ve stepped out of Robot Wars. These have you laying underground electrical cables, a lengthy processes hindered further by a forced low gear and huge, wide anchor dragging behind you. Careful planning is an absolute must when using this vehicle to avoid getting yourself stuck.
Speed, or the lack of it, tends to be the main sticking point with the game. Regardless of what you’re doing, you’re going to be moving slowly so rather than trying to rush things, you’re better off strapping in and trying to enjoy the ride. It can be almost meditative trundling along through the rainy forest with a truck full of logs, and although the game did frustrate me at times, it was usually when I was stuck on a particular objective and hadn’t found a solution.
There’s not always a single, obvious answer to a problem; these are sandboxes so you can often choose how to complete a mission, but occasionally you’ll get missions with only one solution where it’s not clear how to proceed. One noteworthy example was bringing a steel pipe facility back online. As part of a sub-objective I had to deliver steel pipes to my base, but I couldn’t make any as the facility obviously wasn’t online. That particular segment took me a while to solve and was frustrating as it brought all my progress to a stall. That said, it’s hugely satisfying when you work out a way forward.
As well as contending with muddy ground conditions, Roadcraft features some great dynamic weather, with storms kicking in periodically that obscure your vision and make driving across mud trails even harder. One touch I particularly liked is that weather can get more severe as the level progresses. In the opening biome you’re trying to get the sea wall fixed before the storm can hit again, and the closer you get to the end of the mission list, the more the weather picks up. By the end you’re battling a brutal storm while trying to get the sea wall panels in place.
Alongside the environment, vehicles are the stars of the show. They’re big beasts of machines that are delightfully tactile whether steering them through a slalom of fallen trees or loading them up with scrap metal. While they are often slow and lumbering, it’s still a lot of fun picking through the debris-covered roads in them. Although best played in third-person, I recommend switching to first-person every now and then as there are some nice touches in the interiors. My favourites were a mini-fan in the steamroller, presumably to help you deal with the heat from the freshly-laid asphalt, and one vehicle had writing scrawled directly onto the dashboard in marker pen. I don’t know what happens when you go over 110rpm but whoever was in it before me definitely didn’t want me to find out.
While Roadcraft is visually great, it’s not as strong on the audio front. There’s some nice country music playing in the background but it’s surprisingly soft a lot of the time. When you’re concentrating on not getting stuck in the mud or tipping your truck over it can fade into the background and almost get missed entirely. I’d have loved something a little more rugged to match the vehicles you’re in, or even an in-game radio (although in the context of the game it makes sense that there isn’t one).
I really enjoyed my time with Roadcraft. It’s a far cry from the usual sims I play, but it gives some really strong purpose to the various different activities you’re doing. While it can slow to a crawl at times and has moments of frustration because of it, it’s still a lot of fun bringing civilisation back to these battered biomes. Sit back and meet the game at its pace and you’ll have a good time.
