Transportation is important no matter where you are, because things in one place tend to need to be in another. Sometimes the things that need to move are required at easily-accessible areas designed specifically to receive the desired supplies, but as often as not that’s wishful thinking. Roads would be nice but the lack of them can be worked around, and then once delivered there’s the matter of turning the materials into something useful. Big trucks to handle the worst terrain are all very nice, but serious repair work needs serious machinery.
RoadCraftis the next game that’s at least adjacent to the-Runnerseries, which has been comprised ofMudRunner,SnowRunnerandExpeditionsso far. Fans of the series will feel instantly at home inRoadCraft, which features large maps completely indifferent to any attempts to tame them. As the chief operative of a disaster recovery company, it’s your job to clean up and repair areas hit by devastating events, whether that be restoring power, fixing massive broken pipes, cleaning up debris, and of course laying down new roads and bridges to make the terrain passable again. Most of the heavy vehicles are fine when it comes to navigating rocky or waterlogged terrain, but it would be nice to travel at a decent speed rather than wrangle the vehicle for every foot of progress.
Review: SnowRunner
While SnowRunner has a few quirks here and there, overall it’s a fantastic game of exploration and brute-force driving.
TheRoadCraftdemo gives access to limited areas in three different maps, although there’s plenty of room in each to go exploring. The first map is set in a wooded, marshy area with the main task being to get electricity to the factory, while the second requires building a stretch of road and clearing up debris before plotting a course for a convoy to drive through. Finally, the third map is about replacing broken pipes in the hilly terrain above a small flooded town. Every single one of these tasks requires putting the varied abilities of a wide variety of construction machinery through its paces, from scouting jeeps to asphalt layers, steam rollers and mobile crane trucks, and even a giant stationary junkyard crane.RoadCraftis basically a giant sandbox filled with all the coolest trucks, but this time you don’t need to make the brum-brum noises.
Like any good sandbox it can be played either single player or with friends, but the game strongly recommends not tackling its jobs alone. Laying down road, for example, is a four-step process, consisting of filling a dump truck with sand and dumping it where the road base will be, then flattening everything with the grader. Next up is laying the asphalt, and finally the steamroller leaves a nice, smooth surface behind. There’s no reason you may’t do each of these tasks one after the other, but having a friend or two to help out will make the job go quicker. Alternately there’s something to be said about long, slow gaming, so whichever speed you take it at, the reward of a job well done will be waiting.
All Busy Machinery, No Guy Leaning On a Sign
Alone or with friends, though, it’s going to take a while to clear each map because there’s a lot to repair. Starting off in a small area in the jeep, the only terrain that’s revealed on the level map is what’s around you. An objective or two points in the right direction but hitting tab to plan the route won’t be practical until you’ve cleared some of the obscuring clouds from the map by driving to the destination, bouncing over rocks or through the mud while hoping to not get stuck. Unlike theMud/SnowRunnergames, though, staying fueled up and vehicle damage aren’t concerns, so there’s no reason to hold back on the all-wheel drive or differential lock (forcing the tires on either side to spin in sync rather than independently) when getting mired down. On the first map alone you’ll need to drive to a station, find a truck more suited to the deeper water of the bog, use a tree-cutter to clear a path and gather the logs up afterwards, grind down the stumps so they don’t act as deeply unhelpful obstacles and then run power from the station to the factory using the cable layer.
With this many vehicles the controls could have gotten wonky, but for the most part the machines in use are simplified. A steam roller rolls no matter what, unless you accidentally go off road and discover wheels that are basically big smooth barrels have zero traction, while the asphalt layer is either laying down asphalt or acting as a slow car. Cranes, on the other hand, have a large number of potential operations, from reaching forward and back, up and down, rotating the payload and even extending or retracting the cable that attaches to whichever item you’re picking up. There’s a bit of practice involved in grabbing a log or piece of scrap metal and dumping it in the truck bed, but all cranes act the same so whether it’s a mid-sized truck with a small grabbing arm or a larger stationary unit, once you can control one you can control them all.
Fans of the-Runnerseries will feel instantly at home inRoadCraft, which features large maps completely indifferent to any attempts to tame them.
With as many options as there are, the simplified controls make sense, because with over forty vehicles and machines in the full game it would be easy to get a bit lost when a new one comes along. The demo is more limited in scope, of course, without the garage and other features that will add depth to the roadwork, but even so there’s a good five to six hours of gameplay in there even before heading back in after all missions are complete to see what else you can do in the map.
The fullRoadCraftis looking to be a bit of a monster with eight large maps to clean up, very different from theSnow/MudRunner games in a lot of ways, but expanding the gameplay dramatically with more specialized machinery and a greater variety of objectives. Disaster recovery is a complicated process andRoadCraftthankfully takes the human element out of it so players can just enjoy the cleanup aspect, setting a world back to order after nature stomps its way through.
