RoadCraft is a simulator all about running your own construction company, specializing in cleaning up sites of natural disasters and rebuilding infrastructure with a fleet of heavy-duty construction machinery. Unique in its premise and with a strong focus on realistic construction physics, RoadCraft is certain to be a game that appeals to anyone who grew up playing with tractors or staring in awe at heavy machinery. However, it’s not without its flaws, and the large time commitment each level requires can be artificially and annoyingly inflated by bugs and mistakes that simply should not have happened.
RoadCraft’s premise is pretty unique among simulator games and construction sims; the focus on rebuilding after natural disasters is not only different, but I found it especially interesting when compared to some other construction games I’ve played. The game’s very first mission sets the tone of what to expect moving forward, tasking you to build a flood wall in preparation for an oncoming massive storm, which instantly caught my attention in ways other construction games couldn’t.
Given the game’s premise, you might imagine (and you would be right to do so) that much of RoadCraft involves mud, sand, and flooded roads, as well as bulldozers, cranes, and all manner of construction equipment. A whole fleet of vehicles will be made available to you, from trucks to dozers, used to accomplish the many difficult tasks involved in disaster cleanup. You will plot routes for trucks to deliver cargo, load said cargo yourself with cranes, lay sand to create roads with dump trucks, and flatten said sand with bulldozers. The process of renewing devastated environments in RoadCraft is surprisingly in-depth and demanding, requiring quite a bit of time per mission as well as a knowledge of the vehicles you are operating and how to drive them off-road.
I was really surprised by how well done the physics of off-roading in RoadCraft was. You can really feel the difference driving on paved roads, mud, flooded areas, and similar terrain. Scooping and flattening sand in dozers and dump trucks was also especially impressive. My favorite part of the game definitely became making roads for my company’s trucks to navigate better. After this review, I am planning on returning to the game to see how smooth I can make a map devastated by floods and see if I can get my vehicles moving a bit faster.
That being said, the game limits the areas in which you’re able to actually manipulate the environment. This kind of makes sense. Construction workers are not allowed to pave the road leading up to their construction site. But given the theme of the game, it feels more like the programmers just did not want to allow map-wide terraforming at the expense of some areas just being flat-out harder to traverse, permanently. This is more annoying when you then have to move your very finicky AI delivery trucks through there. I get that the challenge is plotting a safe route, but allowing me to pave that route feels like it should have been a given.
As advanced as the vehicle physics in RoadCraft can be, the game has a real problem actually implementing them without breaking. Particularly, there is an issue with the game’s fauna. Off-roading, as you might imagine, is going to be a huge part of your job when doing disaster relief and infrastructure building. What exists off-road? Plants.
The problem is that there is some kind of major collision issue with RoadCraft’s vehicles and plants. Particularly, my chosen scout vehicle, the Minuteman, would have this problem where touching small trees would sometimes fling my vehicle into the air at a thousand miles per hour. Not only does this create the frustration of having to reset at a recovery point, but at times, this glitch would cause me to get stuck in a weird, physics-defying mid-air twist loop that would continue even when I reset my truck at the recovery locations. This essentially soft-locked my missions, forcing me to return to the mission hub as my car was now utterly inoperable due to its new classification as a low-orbit satellite.
That’s not the only glitch I faced, either. While delivering cargo, I had to drive past one of the AI trucks blocking the road. Well, I didn’t have to, but I was feeling lazy and he was going too slow. Upon passing, however, the game suddenly dropped to a really bad 15 FPS, causing my truck to spin out and crash, and making everyone lag for a few minutes after. This kind of killed my patience for the game, and it took me a long time after that incident to give RoadCraft another try.
RoadCraft also, for some reason, features day-one DLC, restricting access to two maps, 4K textures, and a vehicle. This is strange, and these features should just be in the base game, so I’m deducting points for that as well.
Overall, RoadCraft is a very interesting physics-based construction simulator that wants to be very detail-oriented with its process. However, that can kind of fight itself when it severely limits which areas you’re allowed to use the game’s construction mechanics, and the game unfortunately is not free of bugs that can seriously hamper the experience by soft-locking your game and extending the already long time commitment needed to play. I’m more willing to cut RoadCraft some slack for its bugs, because what it’s trying to pull off is hard, but you simply cannot ignore these problems when properly reviewing the game.
The Final Word
If you can ignore the game’s pointless day-one DLC, you will be in for a uniquely themed construction sim with a lot of attention to detail in RoadCraft, albeit one that is not free of its bugs.
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam PC Review code for RoadCraft. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage! RoadCraft is available onSteam,Epic Games,Xbox, andPlayStation.
