RoadCraft Review

Gideon’s Perspective

This is going to be a weird review because my relationships with RoadCraft and its predecessors, like SnowRunner, are a bit weird. You see, after finding my love for Death Stranding, I gave SnowRunner a try and bounced off. I couldn’t imagine anyone finding a game about being stuck in the mud fun. Then I discovered Snowrunner’s hard mode and custom campaign, and I was hooked.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

With those modes, fuel, damage, and money all mattered. Getting stuck or flipping a vehicle required me to send another vehicle to rescue it to try and avoid the recovery fee, because if I mismanaged my time and money, I could actually fail the entire campaign. SnowRunner became as much a planning and strategy game as it did a driving sim, and I loved it.

That should theoretically mean that RoadCraft is right up my alley…and it almost is. Almost. RoadCraft isn’t SnowRunner 2, and I didn’t expect it to be. But given how closely aligned the games are, both thematically and mechanically. I expected RoadCraft to build upon, or at least utilize, the very well-designed foundation of the games that came before it. Instead, it largely threw out the baby, the bathwater, and the whole kitchen.

The result is something that I want to enjoy far more than I actually do, making RoadCraft a game I really want to see updated because I haven’t given up on it entirely.

Gideon’s Bias	RoadCraft Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Hours Played: 40+	Type: Full Game
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X	Platforms: PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Simulation
Mode Played: N/A	Price: $39.99

Road Crafting

Despite not sharing the same name. RoadCraft is largely similar to SnowRunner and MudRunner. You still drive treacherous terrain while making deliveries, and you are in danger of toppling over. However, it’s handled a bit differently in RoadCraft.

You aren’t slowly upgrading vehicles to take on worse terrain. The roster of vehicles at your disposal is quite capable for the most part, as long as you use them for their intended purposes. The catch is that you are helping to rebuild disaster-stricken areas. In addition to mud, roads might be destroyed, fallen trees and boulders block your path, and bridges may have fallen. Where SnowRunner was more about overcoming those obstacles, RoadCraft is about removing them.

You can use cranes to move heavy objects, Bulldozers to push obstructions, and Dump Trucks to dump sand to be smoothed into roads. You have the freeform ability to place bridges, you can cut down trees, grind up stumps, and connect power between facilities.

RoadCraft takes the strategic nature of SnowRunner’s hard mode and makes it into a whole game. At the very basic level, it works brilliantly. The variety of machines are a joy to drive and use, and being able to manipulate the terrain is incredibly cool. The problem lies in the overall execution of the game’s vision. It feels underbaked in many ways.

Simmed Down

The first problem is that many of the simulation aspects that can be found in SnowRunner are gone. Your vehicles can’t take damage, you don’t manage fuel, and you don’t even shift gears. That in itself isn’t a problem. It’s that they aren’t replaced with an equivalent.

There are no time restraints and no overall friction against what you’re doing. This means you can’t actually fail at all. You might slow yourself down, but you can’t fail anything. This means when you’re meticulously stacking cargo with a crane, or doing the laborious steps required to build a road…you really are just checking boxes on a checklist of chores with no pushback.

These actions can be fun or even relaxing at times, especially for my ADHD task-oriented brain. But without an element of failure, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing chores in-game and putting off chores in real life. To give you a good example, some missions have you use an immovable crane to move objects out of an area. These are just time sinks, there is no puzzle, no time limit, and no bonus for efficiency. It’s just moving things by pushing buttons, like one of those toddlers’ toys. It feels incredibly weird.

There is joy to be had in the strategic parts of the game, where efficiency saves you time if nothing else. But the game often holds your hand through much of the process. Where SnowRunner threw you into a map and said, “Figure it out,” RoadCraft is largely linear. The maps are open, sure, but the objectives lead you down a path of events and tell you exactly what to do and where.

Not only does this impede the creative problem-solving elements that would otherwise shine. It REALLY makes you feel like you’re checking off chores on a checklist. What’s the reward for doing so? To get to the next chore. At one point, the dispatcher character Kelly noted that by doing such a good job, I was making things harder on myself, as the company would give me more work. And I found myself agreeing.

To some degree, it feels like some of the simulation elements were ripped out and replaced with hand-holding to appeal to a broader audience. Apparently, chasing that casual gamer dollar is a curse plaguing the industry to such a degree that even a niche vehicle and construction simulation game can’t escape from it.

All Work and No Play

Simulation games tend to make something that should feel like work fun. RoadrCraft tries and succeeds in some ways, but fails in others, largely due to the lack of friction I mentioned. But sometimes due to an odd way of executing its mechanics. I’ll run through some examples.

There are 4 resources in the game: wood, concrete, steel, and pipes. The necessity of these resources is heavily weighted toward concrete and wood because you can make bridges out of them. The other two are largely only used for missions. There are tons of scrap and resources all over the map that you can take to recycling centers to make the corresponding resource. I never felt the need to bother recycling Steel because I got enough from some objectives to finish the other objectives for the most part.

This meant a large number of steel resources scattered across the map was irrelevant. However, I often had to use concrete or wood for bridges. You have to spend time loading up the scrap, taking it to a recycling center, and then loading up the finished resources to carry off. A long and laborious process.

You can recall vehicles to your bases, but they drop anything they are carrying. You can, however, transfer resources between bases, but you have to move them from the recycling center first. At one point, I had the idea that I would make a bunch of concrete, move them to a base, and transfer them between bases as needed, but I realized I would be wasting my time.

I’d have to load up the scrap, convert it, load up the converted slabs to haul them to a base, then load them up AGAIN from another base to carry away. I was better off just carrying them right from the recycling center to where I needed to go, even if the route was long. The fact that resources pulled from your base can’t come autoloaded in your cargo trucks feels bad. Keep in mind, when I say you are loading stuff, I mean you are doing it manually, one by one, with a crane.

For big loads, you need a big truck and a separate crane, which means manually driving two vehicles to that location. Building roads requires four distinct vehicles to be at a location, and you have to move everything alone. You have a couple of vehicle haulers, but sometimes the time you waste getting them loaded up and hauled is more than it would have been to drive multiple vehicles there in the first place.

You have a Mobile Operations vehicle that you can spend special recovery tokens to teleport vehicles to, but that’s your sole saving grace for moving your fleet around, and it feels more like a band-aid.

For many objectives, you have to set routes for AI trucks to follow. Why on earth can’t I do that for my own vehicles? You literally need a fleet of vehicles to tackle these maps, but you have to drive everything yourself

Speaking of AI routes, the AI is incredibly janky and gets stuck on everything; even taking a simple corner can result in them getting stuck, and you need to reset the route. There is a kind of cool mechanism where the terrain degrades with repeated uses, so you have to maintain the route for them, but it falls flat for two reasons.

One, you never know if they got stuck because they are stupid or because there is an actual terrain issue, without going to manually check. And two, once a few trucks finish the route, that’s it, you can just delete it. There’s no reason to actually maintain it. It just feels odd.

There is definitely a solution to some of this. Multiplayer. Sadly, when I ask my friends to play RoadCraft, they look at me like I asked them to run a cheese grater against their face. But even a single other person working with me would open up numerous possibilities. Many hands make light work after all. But that’s sorta the problem, too much of the game feels like work, and tedious work at that, with no meaningful challenge behind it.

Verdict

I think some people are gonna say that I just don’t “get” games like RoadCraft, but I definitely do. I played through Death Stranding, a literal walking simulator, twice. It’s one of my favorite games. Hardspace Shipbreaker is another favorite of mine, and again, I love SnowRunner.

But look at it this way. If you gave me a task list and my task is to do the dishes, but there is a trash can in my way, so I have to take out the trash first in order to do the dishes. That way, I’ll have clean dishes to make dinner. None of that is remotely fun or engaging.

But what if it was gamified? What if I earned extra money for excellent dish stacking, but there was a time limit because guests are coming. If I were late, it would affect my reward, which I need to upgrade my kitchen. Finally, I’d have to cook a great meal for the guests, and I’d be judged on a bunch of criteria in order to pass the mission. In that case, I would…still hate that in real life, but it sure would be fun in a video game!

You can’t just give me a list of tedious digital tasks and call it a video game. There has to be a reason to not only do those things, but to do them well, and checking a box so I can move on to the next checklist simply ain’t it.

RoadCraft is so paradoxical because it axed so many simulation aspects that it feels like it should have, yet has no problem making you individually stack ten slabs of concrete. It can’t decide if it’s a deep sim or not, so it settled into a weird no man’s land in between.

Then you have the bugs…they hurt.

I spent ages filling up an entire semi-trailer with concrete slabs only for it to glitch out and turn into an eldritch horror jittering around the sky, wasting all that time and effort. That’s when I put the game down.

The thing is, I’m not being entirely fair to RoadCraft. SnowRunner may have had simulation aspects that I think RoadCraft is missing, but it didn’t launch with a hard mode or custom campaign. Those are what gave me the friction I needed to enjoy the game, but they didn’t come at launch.

RoadCraft has updates ahead of it, including some kind of “hard” mode. I look forward to seeing it evolve because there are aspects I enjoy, and heck, if I ever went back to SnowRunner, I’d miss the ability to manipulate the terrain greatly. But as it stands, RoadCraft doesn’t feel right. At best, it feels more like a toy and less like a game. At worst, it just feels like busy work.