S**t.
The truck’s come a cropper on that same bend for the third time. It’s not my fault. I’ve now moved the rocks that were blocking the way, so it wouldn’t try to drive over them on two wheels like an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard in which everyone’s wearing high-vis tops.
I mean, it is very much my fault that the piles of sand I’ve accidentally dumped right in the same spot while clearing out the rocks with a dump truck because I was too lazy to fetch a dozer or a crane lorry are still in the way. That’s a problem for a few minutes’ time though, when I snap out of the chunkily-tyred ego trip triggered by having created my own stretch of road, and go ‘Oh, right. I should probably move that’.
RoadCraft is a bit like its weird, bovril-drinking siblings – SnowRunner, Expeditions, the other ones. You know, those Saber Interactive games. The ones in which you’re given a big vehicle that’s often stocked with stuff that could hilariously fall out if you tip over, and pointed at a thing halfway across a big map. More pot-holes than the average UK council estate always await, as part of something like 30 minutes to eight hours of bullying from mother nature.
Its Steam Next Fest demo gives you a taste of about three to four hours worth of this kind of muddy bottom-kicking. Or five to six if you’re like me, have decided to play solo, and refuse to learn any of the lessons the driving game version of the Dark Souls series has tried to teach you so far. It’s a bit different this time, though, because RoadCraft’s spin-off calling card is going more in-depth on letting you pretend to be Bob the Builder.
There’s some of the usual trucking and scouting involved, but the meat and potatoes being kept lukewarm in a glove box next to Johnny Cash’s greatest hits this time are a bit different. Get ready to build your own roads, chop down trees, and lay electrical cables with heavy machinery. You’ll learn what mulching is, and slap some stumps to bits with a giant spinning cutter panel in wonderfully satsifying fashion if you know what’s good for you, sonny.
I’ll be honest, I’m probably making it sound a bit more like wacky mayhem than it is. Much like all of its siblings, RoadCraft adopts a very serious and kind of lifeless simulatory tone, you switching one virtual pipe for another and ending up stalled upside down in the process is something that requires a stoic expression at all times. Saber will let you hop into the driver’s seat of a big scrapyard crane that’s basically a claw machine you’ve got to fill out a 50 page risk assessment to move an inch, but you should not be smiling while you’re in there.
As mentioned, there is a decent amount of fresh stuff to dig into across the demo’s three levels, even if the central loop’s a pretty familiar one. The road building mechanics are a nice excuse to watch big vehicles drive backwards and forwards while you pretend you can smell the tarmac going down. Then, you’ve got the challenge of having to make sure you’ve done a good enough job of both road, er, crafting and moving general debris that’s been strewn about that the AI can follow a route you’ve pinpointed for it without coming a cropper. It’s an interesting twist, given so often these games boil down to whether you yourself, with your lack of concept of things that shouldn’t work, can find a way to overcome obstacles by pulling the kind of nonsense that only a real human could.
That said, you get plenty of exactly that kind of terrain shithousery when doing things like laying cable – you can only put down wires on soft ground, meaning mud and grass, so you’re barred from using the paved roads. What followed in this case for me was dragging a vehicle that’s a very unwieldy shape, but admittedly can drive over anything thanks to its tracks, through the backwoods. Is it ok in real life if electrical wires are just casually laid by someone driving through the middle of a river or swampy pool? Shouldn’t they be somewhere easier to get at than in the middle of some woods a hundred miles from a road for maintenance purposes? Probably not, but it works here.
Fitting a valve, however, proved incredibly difficult. I spent a good hour trying to slot it into place with my crane after lugging it all the way to the pipe from a random scrap yard, and I couldn’t for the life of me get it to snap into place properly. I couldn’t find anything in the codex to work out what I was doing wrong, especially as the regular pipe sections I’d had to replace had snapped right in once I’d taken out the bits they were subbing in for. In the end, I gave up, but I could try again tomorrow, have it immediately sort itself and that wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me with this series.
There’s a decent selection of fresh and interesting vehicles in the demo to try these kinds of jobs with, but the real test for RoadCraft will be whether it does enough different when the full thing arrives to prove it deserves to exist as a separate thing to its predecessors. If it can, it’s something I can see being a cult hit, but if it doesn’t I can see the initial charm of being a slightly inept Bob the Builder being rapidly swept away, like a pile of sand in front of a dozer’s scoop.
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