Saber Interactive are masochists. There’s really no other explanation for the cruel, vehicular-based tortures that they continue to put gamers through. Where MudRunner had you driving through engulfing mud, SnowRunner made that slop colder, wetter and whiter, and Expeditions stranded you in the wilderness, RoadCraft shifts the focus from getting your truck unstuck from the mud and more towards disaster relief.
Using a garage-full of diggers, cranes and dump trucks, you’re tasked with rebuilding and repairing the local infrastructure of various locations after nature has had its way with them. It’s a great fit for their realistic, slower-paced driving tech, and with a group of friends, this might just be the best entry in the series yet.
RoadCraft takes everything that Saber have created over the past decade years, and tailors it to the new construction-based format. That means that some elements from earlier games, like paying attention to the amount of fuel you have in your truck, have been left behind, while new, more specialised machinery has been added to the roster, each bringing unique control mechanics to wrestle with.
That makes RoadCraft more approachable than its forebears. Following the pitted path that the series has been on, there’s more of a focus on doing things, rather than just managing to make it from one place to another. That’s not to say that it’s not still a struggle. Mud remains your vehicles greatest enemy, sucking each wheel or tread into a mire and then making it very difficult to get back out, but the tried and tested solutions from the earlier games, like dropping your truck into low gear, locking the diff, or engaging all-wheel drive, are more effective here.
There also remains the ultimate hack: your winch. Each pickup truck – ostensibly for scouting, but capable of quite a bit more – can attach its winch to most things in the environment, from trees that can help drag you out of the mud through to concrete pipes that you need to get out of the road. It’s a constant lifesaver and you can often find a solution thanks to its multitude of applications.
Several tasks that were probably supposed to be done by a crane were instead achieved by my trusty little pickup dragging debris and industrial equipment around. Albeit, very, very slowly. If there’s one thing that playing Mudrunner games has taught me, it’s how to do things slowly.
The other lifesaver here is the ability to play RoadCraft with others. Up to four players can form a company and head out into each disaster zone, either trundling about ticking off separate objectives to speed through missions, or supporting each other, toiling away together on a multi-person project such as building a road.
One person begins with the dumper truck, carefully unloading a load of sand along the horrendously muddy track that must be made passable. This is then flattened by a bulldozer, its blade scraping the ground. Next, the asphalt-laying vehicle distributes its load across the street, followed by a roller that flattens it all in a slow and sensible manner. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a thrill ride, but RoadCraft manages to be both intense and ridiculously calming at the same time.
These big jobs don’t have to be onerous. In fact, you can choose to automate the procedure if you want, setting each vehicle off from the top-down map, watching them lay down the road from the safe distance of whatever satellite you’re supposed to be observing from. It’s certainly faster, and more precise, but you’re definitely missing out on some of the fun.
There is a narrative chain underpinning each mission, mostly delivered by your sassy handler, but it fundamentally boils down to ‘bad things have happened’. Your company’s response is to leap into action, ready and willing to repair whatever damage has been caused by the different disasters. Each mission sees you working your way through a series of objectives, leading to things not being in quite as bad a state as when you started. You can stay here, and continue to make everything neat and tidy, or you can choose to move on to the next mission.
It feels weird to say that a disaster zone looks good, but the development team have done a great job of making each environment look suitably battered and broken. Tattered trees and crumbling buildings certainly look realistic, but they also feel like real places, rather than some digital approximation of one.
The different vehicles, of which there are 40, are also detailed and suitably timeworn, and you’ll learn to love their different nuances. You can also customise your company vehicles, which is a nice touch to help differentiate each player’s pickup truck, and make it even more of a hoot when you hop in and steal their vehicle when yours is on the wrong side of the map.
Playing with others is made all the more enjoyable thanks to RoadCraft being the most accessible game in the series yet. You’ll still need rescuing from time to time, but the most onerous elements, like tyre pressures or keeping an eye on your fuel, have been done away with. It’s enough to shift the focus onto the task at hand, and playing with others is a consistent delight, turning each play session into being big kids with their digital dumper trucks. It’s been one of my favourite multiplayer experiences of the year, and I can see us regularly returning to it in the coming months.
The only real bumps in the road here are the camera and convoy AI. The camera is often unwieldy, refusing to quite give you the view you want of the action. It is manoeuvrable and you learn to live with it, but it just needs to be a few more increments further out, particularly when you’re using the crane. You also have to regularly set up supply routes for AI to follow between locations, but there’s no leeway or deviation from the route you draw on the world map, often leading to situations where the trucks have just gone a fraction off the safe route. Worse, they’ll just blare their horns at you if you ever happen to get in their way for even a second.