RoadCraft Review: Serious Fun, As Long As You Have Friends

Closing in on an hour into my first mission on RoadCraft, I felt like giving up. Having learned the ropes, I’d been tasked with fetching a generator from an abandoned construction site in order to power up a nearby facility.

Armed with my not-really-a-Land Rover Defender, this involved navigating through the carcass of a half-constructed building, knocking through some large wooden panels to help me navigate through.

In fact, this is the second time I’d reached this point – recovering to my base after embarrassingly toppling over onto my roof, having taken a wrong turn. Guess what happened this time around.

Alone, virtual rain pouring, and the thought of taking that trek again. A check of the clock. Yep, time to quit the game.

Not because I’d given up, though. No, it had struck 10:30am and, as planned, a few of my friends who volunteered to help review the co-op element of RoadCraft had jumped online, ready to get some tyres stuck in the mud. Little did I know just how much fun the next few hours would be.

Starting out

Before getting anywhere in RoadCraft, you’ll need to set up a company. It’s a pretty simple affair: Pick a name (meet Fuddy Muckers); choose a preset livery to apply across your vehicles, and select your chosen scout car.

Early doors, this is a pick between our aforementioned replica Defender or a pickup truck that definitely, not at all, isn’t meant to be a Ford F-150. Don’t overthink this one – you’ll have the opportunity to buy the other pretty quickly.

Your first early steps into the game involve a neatly judged bit of handholding. Covering the basics of your scout car, including when and when not to use the diff lock, all-wheel drive system and low-range gearing is quickly covered.

Old ground for veterans of Saber Interactive-developed games like MudRunner and SnowRunner, but bite-sized enough not to become an immediate bore while still gently introducing new players.

Then, the fun begins.

Teamwork makes the dream work, and makes the work fun

In the typical fashion of the ‘Runner’ series, tasks involve switching between vehicles quite often. More so in fact here, once you really start knuckling down into construction.

Playing solo, this begins to get a little boring and tedious. There’s only so much excitement to be had driving a dump truck full of sand to a muddy bog you want to solidify for a supply route, dropping the sand, then flattening it out, jumping back into a dump truck and doing another 10-minute round trip for another load.

Introduce some players, though (a max of three more), and that tedious part of the game becomes the star of it. Assign yourself a job and get the metaphorical cogs turning, and it becomes satisfying when things are going well, and utterly hilarious when someone gets bored and decides to crane you into the back of a truck.

Tasks are varied enough to keep things interesting for a long play session. Maps will have you starting out by scouting an area for facilities. Covering a post-storm-wrecked landscape with three others in scout vehicles, ready to winch each other out of predicaments (or more accurately, into another, more serious one) turns the game into a real adventure.

With everything in full swing, it had us wondering if we should pack all our day jobs in and go start our own post-disaster reconstruction company for real. Only realising it’s probably less fun when you have to consider financial overheads and do manual labour.

Ultimately, your whole objective is to work together to create reliable routes for supplies, which leads me to my biggest gripe with RoadCraft.

Route cause of frustration

Yeah, if you’ve played anything from Saber Interactive before, you’re unlikely to be surprised to know that RoadCraft lacks quite a bit of polish, and in some key areas, too.

Our biggest gripes came with the AI in the routing system. Ultimately, this is what the game hinges on, and the system currently in use is pretty frustrating.

The tool itself requires you to manually drop points for the AI to follow between A to B, although there’s little evidence of intelligence. The AI will follow that line to the very letter – it doesn’t matter if it clips a tree or an errant barrel, or something so minor that it really shouldn’t cause a problem.

It leaves you perplexed when you’ve just spent 45 minutes creating some smooth tarmac over the boggiest section of a route, only to find it’s failed at the first hurdle with a truck driving itself into a fence because your plot point was 1mm off where it needed to be.

Oh, and don’t you dare drive in front of a vehicle while the route is even going. Doing so will A) lead to them honking at you incessantly and B) often failing the whole route, despite the identical path having been completed successfully by the previous convoy. Hopefully, this can be improved with time.

Mixed performance

Given we’ve been playing from around two weeks ahead of launch to a few days before you’re reading this, we don’t want to be too harsh about optimisation and bugs, but the results have been a bit of a mixed bag.

Running an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and Nvidia RTX 4070 with most settings on High and geared towards Performance, highs of 80fps are common but will often drop below 50fps.

It’s not really a major issue, but some of my co-op players reported much more mixed results on lower-end hardware. Something to keep in mind.

Bugs seem to be few and far between, generally, though it’s worth pointing out we had a game freeze that could only be rectified by deleting our save and starting again. Not the end of the world, 30 minutes in, but hopefully not a sign of things to come.

Oh, and wheel support looks pretty limited for the time being. Presets for Logitech and Thrustmaster are present in the settings, but I couldn’t get the game to detect Moza or Fanatec wheelbases, no matter what I tried.

Should you buy RoadCraft?

This depends on whether you’re taking the helm as a solo player or not. Honestly, as a single-player experience, it’s hard to recommend RoadCraft.

If you’ve got a group of friends willing to get virtually muddy, though, I think it’ll be worth your time, interest in construction or not. Although it’s satisfying to see convoys reach their destinations at the end of all your work, the real joy comes from the adventures with your friends along the way.

Now, if anyone needs Fuddy Muckers for their next job, give us a call.