It’s getting close to 10PM on a Friday night.
There’s a slightly muddy hill. Halfway up it, their tires spinning helplessly, are two trucks carrying goods they need to deliver to a shed about half the map away. I sigh, and give my bulldozer/cargo truck the beans. As one fourteen-wheeled mass, we begin to crawl up the gentle slope, which would be easy pickings if the AI-manned haulers glued to my front scoop had any off-roading capabilities whatsoever.
They don’t. There’s no driving skill to make up for it, either. If they run into an obstacle during the course of the route I’ve plotted out for them which can’t be overcome by simply reversing and pulling forwards less than three times, they just give up. Small rocks terrify them, turns that happen to be in any way sharp are the banes of their existence, and sometimes they seem to roll over just for a laugh. They need me. When I’m not Bob the builder, I’m Bob the babysitter.
What I’ve just described is one of the main things that sets RoadCraft – the latest entry in Saber Interactive’s Spintires series of off-roading sims – from its rugged, outdoorsy siblings. These games, MudRunner, SnowRunner, and last year’s Expeditions, were generally games about you – the player – getting from A to B through untamed environments and getting stuck when you messed it up.
I’ve regularly, and slightly sarkily, compared these games to the driving equivalent of FromSoft’s boss battlers. Notoriously unforgiving adventures about eventual success earned through overwhelming skill or luck, and usually preempted by a crap-tonne of failure that gradually pushes those who haven’t already taken their lumps in the direction of doing the right thing.
When you’re behind the wheel, RoadCraft’s by far the least hardcore title in its delivery of that gameplay loop that Saber has put out to this point. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a learning curve and plenty of ways to mess up that’ll require a reset. However, in its creation of a game that’s more focused on construction, maintenance, and logistics management than it is straight-up haulage or frontier-conquering exploration, the studio’s simplified things.
As you carry out jobs, you no longer have to keep a watchful eye on your fuel gauge or do any repairs if you slam into a wall. RoadCraft’s fleet is permanently fully-fueled and indestructible unless you roll over, sink, or otherwise get wedged in a spot you can’t extricate yourself from. While this, and the resulting lack of an in-depth upgrade system for vehicles, might be a bit frustrating to hardcore haulers, you can see why Saber’s opted to do it.
The rides you’re handed the keys to this time are generally a lot more specialised towards very specific roles for the jobs you’ll be doing as the game walks you through getting locations which have suffered different kinds of natural disaster – from floods, to earthquakes, to hurricanes – up and running again.
You’re running a construction firm that you start off by naming and picking out a livery/logo combo for. When you first deploy into one of the maps, which thankfully are openly free-roamable outside jobs unlike those in Expeditions, you’ll do the usual thing and head out in a nippy scout 4×4 to recon the environment.
Then, your re-construction efforts begin, and can be divided into about five or six different general activities you’ll do in various orders and with different quirks as you progress – scouting, logging, road and bridge building, plotting routes for AI supply runs, debris clearing, and resource delivery.
In terms of the latter, there are four types of resources you’ll need to fix various things – logs, steel beams, metal pipes, and concrete slabs – all of which you’ll acquire by either recycling debris at the plants on each map that part of your job is to get up and running. Getting ahold of those, ferrying them where they need to go, and installing them is done in very SnowRunnery fashion, albeit with manual loading being your only option.
As such, the vehicle I’ve spent by far the most time in during my time with the game so far is the Mule T1 crane cargo truck. As the name suggests, it’s a lorry with very decent off-roading capabilities that’s built to transport goods, and even boasts its own built-in crane.
If you’re playing solo, it’s by far the most important purchase you’ll make early on, because its good stats and that crane mean it’s ideal to handle the vast majority of haulage jobs the game gives you. There is a point where some loads start to get a bit too heavy for it to deal with easily, but I’ve made it up to level 12 so far and it’s still the heart of my fleet. That arguably exposes a bit of a flaw in RoadCraft’s launch vehicle offerings – there’s only one or very occasionally two better successors you can unlock for each of the different vehicle types as you progress.
You do unlock some new types of vehicle around the midpoint, such as a heavy crane and beefier cargo truck that together can handle the heavier loads the Mule struggles with, but in plenty of cases there’s a beginner rusty variant of a specific vehicle, a refurbished version of the exact same model with slightly better stats, and then an advanced variant you’ll unlock once you’re starting to home in on the endgame.
The most egregious example of this is with the field service vehicles. There are two. One you’re given for free at the start of the game and can’t even be repainted in your company livery as far as I can tell, and then its endgame replacement, which you won’t unlock until level 20, which based on my progress so far looks like it’ll be when you’ve basically finished all of the game’s current content.
You’re still unlocking one or two new vehicles or variants of existing vehicles with each level you gain to help freshen things up a bit, but the relatively thin depth at each position and lack of part customisation means the sense of progression feels a lot more limited. No doubt there’ll be plenty of DLC to beef up the roster, but Focus seems to be leaning a bit too heavily on that.
Combined with the aforementioned stripping out of stuff like fuel management, and the XP/cash rewards for jobs being quite generous (the latter especially so because you aren’t constantly spending on upgrades), to this point RoadCraft is the entry in the uber-hard Spintires series I’ve made my way through with the least struggle. The one exception to that, as I outlined in the intro, is that damn route plotting for AI trucks. If it’s the part of the game that’s supposed to dial the difficulty back up, it certainly does just that at regular points, often in infuriating fashion.
If I’ve gotten stuck while driving, usually because I’ve done something stupid, that’s annoying, but at the end of the day it’s on me to do a better job. If an AI lorry I’ve already built a bunch of bridges and roads for requires me to follow it along its entire route and do some push-based babysitting whenever it encounters the tiniest obstacle because it’s using a truck that only works on perfectly straight asphalt highways, that’s less easy to take on the chin. Kudos to Saber for trying something different, but some of the ways I’ve had to resort to helping its lorry Lemmings feel like they pretty much defeat the point of not having me just make the deliveries myself.
While folks who take a bit more time to clear the perfect path might well find RoadCraft lacking a bit of challenge, I’ve personally enjoyed the non-AI lorry bits of it generally being a lot more chill than the usual. The game’s at its best when you’re heading to a base or driving your field service vehicle somewhere and setting up to spend some time doing a specific job. Both act as spawn points for vehicles, though the latter requires fuel tokens that’re pretty easy to earn from side jobs. Once you’re there, you’ll be doing something like watching the four stages of RoadCraft’s namesake party trick, building roads by dumping sand with a dump truck, using a dozer to flatten it, wheeling out your paver to coat it an asphalt, and then hopping in a steamroller to make it nice and smooth.
It’s as mega-satisfying as you always dream baking a cake will be, even if the first step can be pretty unforgiving because it’s near impossible to drop sand in a nice uniform fashion. Luckily, you’ve got the choice to do each step manually or let the computer do it automatically, with the latter tending to go ok given you’re only making short stretches of road. Well, unless your paver finds a small rock you haven’t cleared.
Logging by chopping down trees with a tree harvester, picking up the big twigs with a log hauler, and then cleaning up your mess with a stump mulcher is just as fun. There’s not as much process to laying electrical wires between different spots on the map to power up substations, but finding a way to guide the comically unwieldy cable layer through the backwoods has its good moments, even if it’s possible to get stuck in weird ways.
Overall, RoadCraft offers a unique enough twist on the established Spintires formula, if a streamlined one, to be worth giving a go. Some series veterans will end up longing for the elements it’s stripped out, especially when the new stuff that’s been drafted in is being more frustrating than fun. But, that central loop of frustration giving way to jubilation as you overcome the environment is still there and regularly just as satisfying.
Especially when the convoy you’ve spent all evening pushing up hills finally reaches its destination.
RoadCraft releases on March 20 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. This review was conducted on PS5 using a code provided by the publisher.
