► Off-road sim from the makers of SnowRunner
► Build roads, bridges and more on eight new maps
► Available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S
If you long for the days of sitting on the living room floor and merrily pushing toy diggers and dumper trucks around with zero judgement from others then pay attention, because RoadCraft could be for you. Because while it can’t shield you from disapproving looks from partners/significant others, it can deliver open worlds filled with a vast fleet of construction vehicles ready for you to deploy at a moment’s notice.
Developers Saber Interactive have form when it comes to slow, methodical yet highly addictive games. Back in 2020, they released the popular SnowRunner title as a sequel to MudRunner, while 2024 saw the Expeditions: A MudRunner Game spin-off introduce a slightly more arcade feel to what was, orginally, an off-road driving sim series.
Enter, then, RoadCraft. On the face of it, it combines realistic off-roading with – as the name suggests – infrastructure building and repair in a variety of maps all of which have been hit by some kind of hideous disaster. It’s down to you – and your AI-powered workforce – to restore hope and civilisation to these ruined environs, one gas pipe or road bridge at a time.
What we’re keen to find out is can it deliver a well-judged balance between the hardcore (but sometimes monotonous) aspects of SnowRunner with the more light-hearted (but ultimately less fulfilling) parts of Expeditions. While the full game releases on May 20th 2025, we got our hands on an early demo copy for some early impressions.
What’s new?
Well, the good news is that there’s still an array of vehicles to drive through the kind of challenging environments that would render your average SUV immobile. However, this time, the roster of 40 automobiles includes cranes, bulldozers, tarmac layers and much more.
This is because the hook of the game is not simply to transport materials or objects from A to B (although there’s still a lot of that going on), but to improve the environment to a point where you are actually able to get a decent supply route going. See, one of the frustrations with SnowRunner, was that despite the roster of shiny road-based trucks, you could scarcely use them as the mud and snow never shifted. That’s no longer the case.
Our demo consisted of three maps and in two of them we were able to create additional routes through adding bridges (made from materials scavenged from across the landscape) and laying down roads. The latter can be done ‘by hand’, or by using automations where the player sets a number of trucks to carry out the task as an autonomous team.
Clearly, this is somewhat of a gamechanger. We’ve only seen a handful of the vehicles on offer at launch, but Saber Interactive will undoubtedly add more as DLC and, fingers crossed, this includes a decent selection of road trucks that finally become useful when new roads and bridges are created.
Other tasks included restoring power to locations (by laying down electrical cable) as well as repairing broken pipes – again in order to get key infrastructure working. As such, it feels like the maps should have a greater sense of progression and evolve far more than in previous titles – a welcome feature.
How does it play?
It’s important to note that the demo was very condenses and there’s clearly a lot more that the game can offer – this was very much a taste of the new features. Without being able to see that map progression we spoke about above first hand, it’s difficult to truly get a feel for the title.
However, early impressions were very promising. The trucks handle with a decent balance of agility and heft (you can get from A to B, just not particularly quickly) and the new crane and road laying mechanics we tried were straightforward enough – even if the controls seem a little counter intuitive at first.
Meanwhile, two of the three maps certainly felt much more densely popuplated than previous titles. At 4km2 the final game maps will be the same size as the largest examples from Snowrunner, but even in the demo we saw far more objects, debris and general feeling of the aftermath of chaos than in previous titles. There’s still a total lack of NPCs or other traffic by the looks of things (and thus it feels like a ghost town), although the technical complexities behind introducing such a feature are obvious.
Happily, our demo came with very few bugs, but we did notice that – unsurprisingly – the feature where you’re able to lay out a path for supply trucks (driven by AI) does take a little trial and error. It took three attempts to get the trucks to make it to the destination successfully, despite a fairly straightforward path being input.
Also, a couple of features appear to have been jettisoned (although we’ll wait until the final version to be sure). Our demo showed no sign of vehicles being able to take damage (beyond engine flooding) and the fuel tank reading is nowhere to be seen. Small things, but they helped with the overall immersion in SnowRunner.
As for the graphics, we were playing on a powerful gaming PC that was more than a match for the recommended specs of RoadCraft and as such got to witness the full visual effect of the demo. To our eyes, it was a step up from SnowRunner and often delivers a surprise visual treat as you’re going about the various tasks and switching between different camera modes.
Up to 4-player multiplayer is available and was active on the demo version, but we’re going to wait until the full game before sampling this feature.
RoadCraft demo – verdict
It might not be the final version, but there’s a lot of promise in this early demo of RoadCraft. Saber Interactive didn’t quite get it right with Expeditions: A MudRunner Game but this latest title looks to have regained the sense of tactical adventure that we loved about SnowRunner while adding in some intriguing new features.
We suspect the success of RoadCraft will depend on the level of freedom the player truly has to tackle the various tasks in game. The road and bridge building is a brilliant concept, but it’s best delivered in a sandbox format with the player having choice over where and when they make changes to the map.
We’ll have to wait for the full game in May to answer the above, but for now the RoadCraft demo is out on February 24th 2025. Let us know what you think in the comments!
Platform tested: PC
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