Saber Interactive’s mud-splattered, off-roading simulation titles Mudrunner and Snowrunner are something like the Bear Grylls of driving games: the elements and terrain are the stars of the show. Cargo deliveries and construction missions merely provide an excuse to leave tire tracks all over the challenging Siberian expanse, Yukon’s alpine forests, and Wisconsin lumber yards in a realistic re-creation of heavy-duty tours.
RoadCraft has the same detailed driving simulation players have come to expect with all-new vehicles and terrain as well as eight four-kilometer maps including tropical regions, mountain ranges, lush forests, and stagnant swamps for players to rebuild in the campaign.
Not to mention one major new addition: This time, you’re also placed in the steel-capped shoes of the head of operations, using management sim mechanics to direct a disaster recovery crew to rebuild facilities in the aftermath of a catastrophe. As well as hopping into the driving seat whenever you desire (with up to four players in co-op), you’ll also devise the logistics chains needed to deliver vital materials exactly where they’re needed.
Each location is the site of a natural disaster that you must restore. Yann François, the game’s brand and creative manager, says the gameplay loop pairs a playful childish sandbox with the adult urge to perform humanitarian acts and help leave the world a better place. In a hands-off Gamescom demo, François took the wheel to show how these elements combine to reconstruct a harbor ruined by devastating floods.
First, the cleanup operation. After clearing a path littered with damaged shipping containers with a crane, players connect the harbor to transit points to enable your fleet of trucks to deliver materials and fix a bridge to the next map section. But there’s one problem: The waterlogged ditches between the harbor and the next transit point are destined to clog your trucks’ wheels and prevent any progress.
In Saber’s previous simulations, you were stuck working around awful road conditions with patience, careful steering, and hard-won upgrades. In RoadCraft, you can fix the environment directly.
The solution François chooses is sand, one of the multiple fully physicalized elements placed at players’ disposal. After loading up a dump truck, driving to the first troublesome quagmire, and unloading a mini dune, this fix is enough for this vehicle to proceed with moderate difficulty and spluttering engines, but hardly a smooth passage for the convoy. Switching to a bulldozer, François can lower its blade to turn the sand into a flat surface that provides a far better path for the trucks.
Task complete, François switches to the operations view. Here he plots the route for a truck convoy to transport masses of concrete to a broken bridge in dire need of repair. First, he drops a daisy chain of markers along the top-down view of the dirt road. The next step is validation; a test driver attempts the route you’ve mapped before the main operation can begin in earnest. A third of the way through, the truck stalls. Its expedition halted, the route is missing a makeshift sand-path that will enable passage.
A countdown starts before validation fails. The route can be replotted, or you can intervene before time runs out. I watch François race against time, taking to the bulldozer yet again to ram the truck out of the mud so it can pass validation. He fails, sighs, replots the errant marker, and tries again. It’s a great example of the entertaining low-stakes chaos the game is built to accommodate. If he had time in the demo, he’d assign the asphalt paver to the same route first to lay a smoother tar road for the convoy.
Saber’s previous simulation titles could often be challenging and intensely time-consuming, especially in the early game. François believes RoadCraft’s co-op gives players another way to surmount its off-road challenges.
“The game has been designed for both solo and co-op experience. It’s a more task-driven game, there are very specific tasks such as driving or operating a crane or depositing sand,” he says. “So by playing with your friends or strangers, you choose: how do you want to play? The game is designed for sharing tasks, and also gaining some time, because it can be time-consuming!”
François particularly enjoyed the co-op specialization provided by their modular approach to tasks.
“It was quite a laugh because it allows really emergent gameplay. It’s like a role-playing game. You can say, ‘Okay, you’ll be the bulldozer because I trust you to push things, but you’re not very thorough so I’ll take the sand deposit.’ Every vehicle has its own gameplay, you can adapt to every vehicle by changing your mindset.”
With over 40 vehicles—from simple trucks to forklifts, giant cranes, and trench diggers—the game has a huge amount of variety for players to devise their own reconstruction efforts. And as someone more prone to knocking things down than building them up, I already suspect I’ll be the one on bulldozer duty.
Wishlist RoadCraft now on the Epic Games Store.
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