About 8 years ago I played the original Mudrunner game beta on my PC and was blown away by the detailed vehicles, mud and water physics, and how a game that was basically a constant man & vehicle vs landscape struggle could be so darned addictive.
If you've never heard of the series, Mudrunner was followed by Snowrunner, and then came Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, and now we have Roadcraft, which shares the physics engine and core concept, but differs somewhat in its gameplay focus.
Mudrunner and Snowrunner focus on industrial tasks like transporting cargo through extremely challenging terrain, using a winching mechanic to move the vehicle when stuck in deep mud or water, and Snowrunner introduced snow as an environmental factor. Expeditions shifted the focus to exploration and navigation and Roadcraft adds features like disaster recovery and infrastructure rebuilding, including fixing pipelines, electrical networks, building bridges, recycling materials and large amounts of ground deformation, all using a selection of construction, transport, logging & exploration vehicles. Apart from all the road building and patching up holes and washouts, Roadcraft is a mix of strategy, resource management, a vehicular puzzle or two and a lot of skillful driving–I also enjoyed building up a fleet of my favourite and most useful vehicles, and couldn't help but be impressed how many you could have on a map.
The game's impressive landscapes have all been damaged by storms, earthquakes etc, wrecking the roads and power networks (electricity, gas & water) and you are basically International Rescue–without the Thunderbirds. The map is almost completely clouded over at the start, and the clouds clear as you explore.
In my humble, casual simgamer opinion, the fuel consumption is set to a rather stupidly high level, and ruined the game for me right from the start, so I restarted my campaign with fuel consumption turned off and immediately had more fun. Roadcraft is quite hard enough without having to turn off your engine every time you change vehicles (to save fuel) and manage fuel distribution, delivering fuel to vehicles that have run out etc. Apart from Fuel, Convoy Difficulty, Manual Gearbox, Bridge Costs, Quarry Zone Size (sand usage), Recovery Costs and Vehicle Prices can all be fiddled with to adjust the difficulty. Maybe hardcore Mudrunners will want to struggle with every single aspect of the game, but not me. Thankfully all the aforementioned options are available to make the game lighter, and more about exploration, enjoyment and achievement than fuel consumption worries. It might have been nice to be able to adjust things during your "career" though, as you have to restart if you find the game too hard (or easy), so maybe this option can be added with an update.
A recent patch adjusted recovery rules, corrected payments, vehicles getting stuck with invisible cargo, supposedly fixed an AI route bug that made the NPC drivers look like idiots (they're not the brightest bunch even now), tyre deformation physics correction on one vehicle–as well as some steering wheel/pedals fixes–sadly the fuel consumption is still ridiculously high, to the point where I’d swear I could actually see the fuel gauge needle drop on some vehicles.
AI seems to be everywhere nowadays, and I was skeptical of being able to plan routes for AI convoys along roads that even your best industrial logging vehicles struggle to navigate–and rightly so. The AI follows your plotted checkpoints, but not quite accurately enough, and so gets itself stuck frequently. It will collide with your vehicles–although to be fair you do get a warning of an AI vehicle's approach with some radio chatter–and it'll blare its horn like a roadraging psycho as it plows into you or zooms by, should you manage to avoid it. It will even behave this way with other AI convoys, and their limited intelligence will allow them to back off if they get stuck, collide or blocked, and try again 3 or 4 times before the route is failed, and you have to find a solution–either by plotting the route more carefully, or using an alternate route, or by improving the road surface–sometimes this can be best achieved by building an entirely new road, widening existing ones and even carving your way through trees. One thing cannot be argued with; seeing a convoy get to its destination after you worked hard to clear sand, grade, surface and roll a road is a very satisfying experience, and almost a game in itself.
Another AI-related issue is the protocol that chooses which object to attach your crane hoist to, which could use some tuning. Go to load up a large stack of something and you'll often have to cycle through the entire pile to get the thing you want–it'll even select things you've already loaded or objects pinned by other objects and unavailable to tether to before selecting the thing you have the end of the jib pointed at. When tethering/strapping a load to a truck, the AI is a bit dopey too, a truck will think a vehicle parked some way away is loaded incorrectly (including the crane that loaded it) and so refuses to strap whatever you do have loaded - and hilariously this even includes huge static junkyard cranes and massive dock cranes on rails!
As for winching, well Roadcraft seems to have forgotten its roots and on many maps very few objects can actually be winched to when you're stuck. Another related gripe is that cranes detach their loads when you swap to another vehicle, and you can't help a buddy in co-op by co-winching something that he's already attached to, nor can you attach to them to give them a boost if they're winching or towing. Fortunately you can give stuck loads a shove, and this becomes particularly useful, as the big rigs in the game spin their wheels and get stuck all the bleedin’ time.
There are a lot of controls to learn for every vehicle, some are rather quirky and complicated–probably overcomplicated to be honest, and require concentration and patience to master. Fortunately Saber included plenty of on-screen help and a useful Codex of vehicle controls. Many controls are common among vehicles so getting used to a new one is never too difficult. Some controls do lack finesse however, and that’s something that can definitely be improved.
I thought Roadcraft must be built in Unreal Engine 5, but in fact is built with Saber Interactive's heavily reworked and new-generation Swarm Engine, which incorporates Havok to create its realistic terrain and vehicle physics. This custom engine looks remarkable, plays smoothly in the "quality" mode, has a long draw distance with zero pop-up, and allows for detailed material manipulation, such as creating roads from sand and asphalt, building bridges and filling holes and washouts in the landscape. The simulation of sand needs a mention too, flowing and spreading in both a realistic and unrealistic way at the same time. When dumped out of a tipper truck the sand flows as you'd expect, but tends to flow under or through walls and rocks. It also acts weirdly because you can't bury other movable objects with it–they simply “float” to the top, and this includes vehicles. This can however, be used to your advantage, using sand to “jack” stuck vehicles out of all sorts of unlikely places!
Talking of vehicles, they all look amazing, with a level of detail that I'm not sure I've seen before in this genre. One disappointment is that although the player vehicle has a driver, as in Mudrunner and Snowrunner the landscape is completely uninhabited and there's no wildlife either, other than a few high-flying birds.
Roadcraft provides a unique physical experience and is quite different from its predecessors, Mudrunner, Snowrunner and Expeditions. Swarm is quite possibly the cleverest game engine of the last few years. The sheer amount of topographical changes you can make left me gobsmacked.
The scenery is some of the best I've seen this year. Leaves and branches fall from trees, and you can actually catch a branch with a vehicle and it'll twang back–these thick forests look even better than RDR2's gorgeous flora, there are no GTA V-style trees made of cast iron and they don't fall down as soon as you hit them either. You can push trees over with vehicles but they have roots, and it takes some effort. The game has several different tree harvesting vehicles and 2 different stump removal mulcher vehicles should you need to gather logs or simply clear a path to build a new road. The logging mechanics are similar to the Farm Simulator games, but the whole process looks so much better in action.
While you don't exactly change the landscape, the amount of ground deformation and construction you can do is impressive, and is all saved to the map for as long as you play it. The game has a huge tyre track memory so you'll see where your vehicles have been for some time. You can build roads just about anywhere, and it's amazing how important just about every vehicle is at some point.
An impressive multiplayer mode allows up to 4 players to co-operate (thanks for the “help” Becky & Chris!), and crossplay is enabled too–we've had several enjoyable, issue-free sessions with Gamecell's very own Paul on his PS5, complete with voice chat! Having another player or players to help really elevates Roadcraft, and I've seldom had this much fun or this many laughs when playing a co-op game. I was delighted to find that I could play with my nephew in Australia and a friend in the U.S. at the same time, with no problems whatsoever.
Although the time of day clearly passes and incredibly realistic clouds scud across the sky, there's no actual day/night cycle. The sun does get high and low however, changing the shadows significantly. The lighting changes further when it rains too–and boy does it rain!–and the roads get noticeably more slippery. The sandstorm on the desert level is remarkable, reducing a sunny, beautiful desert landscape to something that resembles a dust storm on Mars. To go back to traction levels, I think they're a bit wrong–particularly with tracked vehicles and semi trucks, which can get stuck on very gentle slopes or in shallow water. Some vehicles also have rather “pointy” steering (a tendency to oversteer) but this is only on some vehicles, and you will get used to it–I did.
Apart from beautiful major game elements like the weather, mud and water there are dozens of nice little touches like mud splatters, water dripping when vehicles emerge from floodwater, and showing a remarkable level of detail, straps and chocks secure vehicles to transporters. The game sounds good too, with everything from growling engines to tweety birds and some perfectly appropriate incidental music.
The Field Service Vehicle is a vital part of any operation, an articulated tracked vehicle, it'll go practically anywhere and acts as a mobile hub, so you can call any vehicle remotely to it–as long as you have a Service token–these are earned simply but completing either Main and Side objectives. There's a larger, more powerful Mobile Operations Base available, but it has no winch for some reason, which reduces its usefulness somewhat, but it does have a trick up its massive sleeve–it can be used as a mobile resource zone, meaning you can drop items (logs, steel beams, pipes or concrete slabs) next to it and they'll be added to your base's resource stash. The various resources (which can be bought or made by activating the various manufacturing plants and recycling scrap at them) are used to build bridges, a process which is kept simple as all you have to do is place the bridge via the map view and deliver the required materials to one end of the planned bridge or another. Other missions require you to deliver a certain number of logs/beams etc to a certain location.
I must complain about the map view–which ironically is without doubt the best I’ve ever seen in a game. Why does the amazing, drone's-eye-view map flip around? I may be weird but I'd always rather that NORTH was at the top of the map and I could swivel the map if ever anything was obscured, but the map likes to swivel, for no apparent reason, which is disorientating to say the least! Fortunately there is an option to make North stay North in the settings–weirdly under “Camera Alignment”–but why isn't this the default?
Another major gripe is the grapple points on vehicles, which are all wrong, more often than not flipping the vehicle onto its roof when hoisted! There really aren't enough winch points available on the vehicles either, so pulling an overturned vehicle back onto its wheels is unnecessarily fiddly.
There are 8 maps in the basic game, with 2 more in the Rebuild DLC, which ramp up the difficulty noticeably and include some seemingly impossible tasks (delivering incredibly fragile contaminated flasks) that I don't believe are actually doable. If the 8 huge maps (4km² or more) aren't enough for you, there are User-Created scenarios, which is a bit disappointing as when I saw “Mod Browser” I had envisaged a selection of Farm Simulator-style vehicle mods.
The camera view is almost infinitely adjustable, which is often required in order to get the perfect view of something you're working on–be it loading it, tipping it or cutting it down.
Every vehicle has an intricately modelled interior, the detail of which rivals many sim games. The driver's view features fully functional mirrors and a "lean out of the window" reversing view like many truck sims–this comes in very handy when reversing an 18-wheeler! Keys that jiggle in the ignition, air fresheners that sway on their strings, sun visors that wobble and fully working rear-view mirrors add to the realism. You can't help but notice dust thrown up by wheels and tracks, exhaust smoke (that actually corresponds to your throttle inputs), steam from brakes and weather flaps on exhaust stacks. It's also worth mentioning the crane/lifting physics, which vary realistically according to jib/boom length versus lifting strength. It's this sort of detail that makes Roadcraft special.
The scenery has logical destruction levels–to a point. Most trees can be cut down or pushed over (depending on the power/weight of the vehicle) and many objects (including fallen branches, crates, wheelie bins & portaloos!) are destructible. Areas that could be improved are traffic lights, streetlights, telegraph & power poles, which are the most solid things on any map, and there are no demolishable buildings either, which is a shame.
Resource management becomes second nature, and no matter how good a driver you are, good management goes a long way to how efficiently you complete a map.
The base game has an impressive 52 vehicles, and there are a couple of very handy DLC vehicles available too. Each vehicle has "rusty" (usually found on a map) and "restored" variants which can be bought with your hard earned cash, the restored models coming with better paint jobs and noticeably better capabilities.
Roadcraft kind of reminds me of Nintendo 64 classic Blast Corps, but in fact it's actually the closest I'm likely to get to playing with all my childhood Corgi, Dinky, Britains & Matchbox models in a sandpit. I'm not sure if it's a recommendation or not, but it's caused an awful lot of cold cups of tea & coffee…
With a number of “Easter Eggs", 44 Achievements/Trophies and an unknown number of collectibles–including model vehicles that can be sold for 10,000 credits, and “special” barrels that fetch 40k!–Roadcraft will keep you busy for some time.
Currently on Game Pass, Roadcraft is priced at £34.99 (or £27.99 with Game Pass.) and comes highly recommended, as long as you're patient enough to learn to control the vehicles.
Many thanks to Focus Entertainment, Saber Interactive and Indigo Pearl for the review codes