RoadCraft lets you exert your will over nature with industrial machinery
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بحلول Julian Benson, Contributor
Strong winds carrying grit and stone whipped free any material not tied down, leaving the facility's access road completely inaccessible. The narrow strip of tarmac is strewn with rubble, fuel drums, and large sections of industrial piping.
Further from the plant, outside the facility's fences, the road has disappeared completely. The storm picked up tons of loose sand and deposited it on the road's surface, leaving no sign of the valley road that wound from the clifftop resource depot to the now inaccessible solar panel plant. From above, the winding road looks like a worm after science class, its black tarmac body dissected into chunks by landfalls of sand.
As the head of the disaster relief team in RoadCraft, you are responsible for stitching that road back together and bringing life back to the solar panel plant. The storm has damaged factories and facilities all over the region, and they need new solar panels to come back online.
RoadCraft comes from the same team that made MudRunner, SnowRunner, and Expeditions - A MudRunner Game, and it's built on the same bones as those physics-heavy simulators. These are driving games where the challenge isn't getting somewhere fast; it's getting there at all.
As with the other games, in RoadCraft, the ground under your tires shifts and moves with the weight of your vehicle. Heavy trucks will sink into the sand and become stuck, and when tackling disasters on maps set in Eastern Europe, they will become stuck in thick mud or lost in deep swamps. This is a series where you must learn to drive cautiously, finding a route to your objective through a heap of hazards.
However, unlike the previous games, you can finally exert some control over the environment in RoadCraft, rather than just picking a path between all its snares. The road to the solar plant may be a lost cause, but with your extensive roster of industrial machinery, you can now build a new one. That said, it will not be straightforward—as it is with everything in this series.
Before laying the new road, you must clear away the mess nature made of the old one. Boulders litter the route, and only the nimblest 4x4s can nip between them. The convoy of trucks you'll be sending to the solar panel has no hope of getting through without your help.
You have an extensive roster of more than 40 specialist vehicles to pull from in RoadCraft, each a gasoline-guzzling scalpel for solving specific problems. The blade you need for this operation? A 100,000-pound bulldozer. Using this powerhouse of a vehicle, you clear the hazard-covered stretch of road by simply shoving the boulders clear. You can get its scraper underneath rocks and raise the machine's arm to toss the blockage aside.
The next step, counterintuitively, is to dump more sand over the already-buried section of tarmac. You need an even coating to form the foundation for a fresh surface. For this, you'll need to swap to a dump truck. As with the bulldozer, the vehicle has its unique functions: In this case, you can raise and lower the flatbed at the dump truck's rear, pouring sand onto the stretch of road.
After the bulldozer gives the sand a quick pat down, it's ready for a fresh layer of asphalt. Unlike RoadCraft's more complicated vehicles, this only requires driving a paver over the flattened sand. As you drive along your nascent road, the vehicle gleefully belches out hot concrete automatically.
The final step is compacting the soft asphalt into a surface that will withstand the repeated back-and-forth of convoys of heavy trucks. Naturally, this calls for a roller. As with the paver, you only need to move the slow-moving tank's 30,000-pound drum along the road to complete this task. If it helps pass the time, do as I did and imagine you're crushing hapless security guards.
While you can complete all these steps on your own, RoadCraft supports four-player co-op. So, you can speed the process along by working together—one player clearing the way with a bulldozer while another follows close behind in a dump truck pouring out sand. Then, as the bulldozer loops back, flattening out the fresh sand, they can be followed by the paver and roller.
As the saying goes, many hands operating heavy machinery make light work.
The debris-filled access road calls for a completely different set of tools. The road under all the obstructions is still perfectly usable, but the narrow passage will make it impossible for the bulldozer to clear. Instead, you need to lift the offending objects out of the way with cranes.
Operating these heavy-duty machines is much like operating a claw machine in an arcade, except the prizes here aren't stuffed Pikachus; they're drums of industrial solvents. After driving one of the crane vehicles into the access road, you can anchor it to the ground with four legs and extend and rotate the arm freely. Lowering the crane's grabber, you clutch the debris and drag it off to the side of the access road.
It's oddly delicate work, but with dedication, you'll have the alleyway clear quickly. However, if you're playing in co-op, two crane operators will make the road usable again much more quickly.
With the road rebuilt and the path up to the plant clear, you can now plot a path for a convoy of relief trucks to travel there from the depot. Success! For now, of course.
In the full game, there is a whole other level to RoadCraft that's new to the series. Connecting the various manufacturing facilities by building new roads and bridges through the areas worst-hit by natural disasters—and plotting routes for automated convoys to travel between them—fills your coffers with credits to buy new vehicles for your fleet and upgrade those you already own.
While your resources are limitless in the demo, in the full game you need to collect the debris obstructing your route and recycle it, or cut down the trees and process them into lumber, and then use those materials to build roads and bridges.
The previous driving games from Saber didn't have this level of economy, which turns this industrial toy box into a more thoughtful game. Now, the woods between the power plant and the cement factory aren't just an obstacle to be cut down; they're a resource that you can convert into bridges over the swamps.
The recent RoadCraft preview shows that under the skin of this new game is the familiar skeleton of MudRunner, SnowRunner, and Expeditions, but it's now powering a game that gives you much more agency in the world. You aren't simply using all the tools of your fleet to navigate the space; you are now going to be able to reshape it to serve your needs.
Few games have open maps that promise to let you change them as fundamentally as those in RoadCraft. If you've been waiting to show nature who's boss, you should pencil RoadCraft's May 20 release date into your calendar. Though, maybe using a heavy duty stamp would be more appropriate.
Pre-purchase RoadCraft today on Epic Games Store.