I am falling asleep at the wheel of a big bulldozer. RoadCraft is not necessarily a boring game, but it is so meditatively slow, lumbering, and bit-by-bit that I find myself dozing when I’m supposed to be, um, dozing. Some of this is down to simple tiredness, but there’s also a dreamy sensation while playing this engine-purring infrastructure ’em up. I don’t mean dreamy in the sense that it fulfills the promise of nostalgic fantasy put forward by the game’s trailer (the one that suggests you’ll feel like a child playing with toy diggers again). I just mean that flattening sand makes me sleepy.
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It is a simulation in the most traditional sense. You’re the operator of a construction company that specialises in rebuilding roads and supply networks after natural disasters have wrecked the landscape. Rockslides, earthquakes, floods – all the devastation mother earth can possibly throw at a major railway line or harbour town. It’s your job to fix the place up with a fleet of diggers, bulldozers, steamrollers, and sand haulers, among other vehicles you may have never even seen before.
Your objective can be as straightforward as steering an all-wheel drive Jeepalike from a ruined factory to a derelict gas station, while using a blippy radar button to scan the ground and see which paths are drive-uponable (green circle for good solid dirt, red X for wheel-trapping muck). But this scouting quickly evolves into missions of hauling scrap metal to recycling plants using cranes and cargo trucks, or dumping mounds of sand into muddy holes to make a route passable for later AI-controlled convoys.
Laying roads is the most common activity, a necessity upon which all other deliveries and drivealongs rely (the clue is in the name). To build a road takes multiple steps in different vehicles. First, bring a dump truck full of sand to an offensively muddy patch of land and upend the stuff in as neat a line as you can. Then use a dozer to flatten the sand like a big coarse pancake. Third step, get an asphalter to come and make hot tarmacky love to the surface of the earth. Finally, use a roller to flatten it all out, following some big glowing lines to ensure it is suitably “road”ish.
This to-and-fro often involves getting those less capable vehicles (eg. the roller and the asphalter) to the scene of construction, a place which may itself be cut off by boggish obstacles or landslide-stricken roads. Ultimately, it’s a long process that you can sometimes automate, but realistically it’ll take up the majority of your time. Other objectives, like replacing pipes in pipelines or laying electric cables offer their own challenges. But you’ll often want good roads before doing any of that.
The vehicles themselves feel suitably weighty. They bounce and tip and sway with all the heft you’d expect from a game by the developers of SnowRunner. But they’re also sometimes fiddly in a way that makes my brain do a mental squint. Vehicle controls can feel cluttered, with many mechanistic movements shoved onto one controller. Face buttons do things like activate low gear mode (wheels no slippy-slip) or lock differential (car no fall over). Simple enough on their own. But then holding down shoulder buttons unleashes a small swarm of vehicle specific controls – loader ramps, cargo straps, anchor feet.
It’s hard to tell if the resultant clawhanded shenanigans is intentional or not. The crane controls are particularly pat-head-rub-belly-ish. For me using some vehicles was often a bunch of staccato hand movements, like I was playing some kind of Toyota Land Cruiser QWOP. I want to say it soon gets easier, but the constant swapping of vehicles effectively stalls practice in each type of movement. Like many things in RoadCraft, getting a handle on the machinery took much longer than I expected. That I got the controller working at all was also a relief – the game had some issues with this at release, and the devs recommend disabling Steam controller input, which worked for me.
The slow and steady rhythm means it can take hours to do fundamental stuff, like getting a supply route into good shape. And despite the HQs and special trucks, both of which let you spawn vehicles nearby, there’s still a lot of lumbering back ‘n’ forth over the same roads. This isn’t at all bad if you love the feel of a big vehicle under your thumbs, but you will have to be really into Caterpillar if you’re to avoid the inevitable yawns at a tenth sand-lugging trip up and down the same dirt track.
Some excitement did kick in any time I was asked to explore some new region, or scout a path from some busted town to an abandoned steel pipes factory. It’s in the simple act of getting from A to B that RoadCraft excels – an adventurous rumble to find out exactly what B looks like, or what lies between. This isn’t surprising. The developer’s previous SnowRunner and MudRunner games made the bumbling journey their core pleasure. The objective there is simpler, and there’s no hopping around from tow truck to road wrecker to sand presser to rolly polly boy. Those are games about driving, whereas RoadCraft is a game about logistics.
This is where things get mucky. There’s a tension between the management side of things and the physical act of driving about. Once a route has some decent roads (or at least some reinforcing sand) you will plot a course from, say, a settlement to an oil refinery. Then watch as a convoy of wee computer-controlled eejits drive to their destination as safely as possible. In this way you earn resources, and money to buy new, slightly better vehicles (a cargo truck with a built-in crane is your fist must-by vehicle – since it avoids some of that cumbersome vehicle swappage).
While you become more adept at maneuvering through the muck and rocks of the landscape, those AI workmates aren’t always as adaptable. Plotting viable routes for your AI drivers can quickly become an act of parenting, as you pick up every little shopping trolley or abandoned car that the dumbasses ride straight into. It’s your responsibility to help these computerised HGV morons avoid even minor detritus – you’re the one with the eye in the sky, after all, a wide satellite map showing detailed road ruination with multiple levels of zoom. But I still felt like slapping the drivers in the back of the head. Please Jerry, attain a basic level of autonomy wouldya? Though there is comic relief when those same drivers come honking down the road in a panic, and crash into you as you try to lay down some sand or crane concrete debris into the back of a truck.
The conflict between hands-off management sim and do-it-yourself design is noticeable when you look at what specific tasks need to be done manually and what busy-bodying is outsourced to the game. You can unload big steel bars and slabs from the back of your cargo truck with the tap of a button, for example. But loading them onto the truck requires a crane and lots of your own work. You have to carry certain recyclable cargo from place to place, but refilling sand can be done at the push of a button anywhere in range of a sand quarry.
What does this game want me to be: a digger driver, or a foreman? Each of the time-savey features may individually make sense from the designer’s perspective, but it makes learning the language and intentions of the game more difficult. When I see processes like speedy sand loading or rapid cargo chucking, it makes me desire other quicker, button-tappy ways to auto-do things, which is arguably against the entire philosophy of the game’s slow and manual approach.
In its best moments it reminds me of the connective roadmaking and zipline networking of Death Stranding – a grindy walking sim that I found myself enjoying to my own utter astonishment. In RoadCraft, the building of roads is a multi-step physical process, rather than Norman Reedus’ hoovering up of resources and dumping them in a postbox. This should – in theory – feel more satisfying and meaningful. But somewhere in all the switching in and out of multiple vehicular bodies, I felt a juddering sense of “start-and-stop, start-and-stop, start-and-stop” that frustrated me. In multiplayer this problem may not exist, as each person can man one vehicle and take on a specialist role – sand flattener, rolly polly-er, earth fucker. But I haven’t found time to try that out – maybe in a future article.
If I had lots of free time, I would probably enjoy it a lot more. But I don’t, so tipping over with a cargo bay full of steel beams makes me frown, where it might have otherwise made me laugh. This, I think, is another issue. RoadCraft is a podcast game, in the same vein as Truck Simulator or Elite: Dangerous. There’s a big place for games like this in the world, sims that excel in delivering a specific kind of wonderful and comforting boredom. Slow tasks that act as a reassuring sedative in the manic whorl of life. But RoadCraft’s start-and-go flow makes it a bumpier ride for me. I was falling asleep, but I never quite drifted off into its promised dreamland.
