RoadCraft was provided by Focus Entertainment for review. Thank you!
RoadCraft was a really intriguing game to me when it showed up last year. I was a big fan of SnowRunner and was looking forward to the Expeditions game. RoadCraft looked like another, unique spin on the franchise. But does it stick to what makes games like MudRunner and SnowRunner so appealing? Well, the answer to that is both yes and no.
SnowRunner was all about you and your vehicle against the unforgiving terrain, you had to plan ahead and persevere through rugged terrain to reach your objective. RoadCraft, however, takes a different approach. Instead of focusing on your vehicle, RoadCraft puts the emphasis on infrastructure. Your vehicle cannot take damage, it does not have fuel, and the functions available to you are purely practical ones for the purpose of building roads or moving cargo; you can't even control your headlights in this one.
What you will mostly be doing in RoadCraft, then, is fixing roads and other infrastructure. While the game does feature almost identical vehicle and terrain physics to SnowRunner, the actual muddy and difficult-to-pass terrain in RoadCraft is in the minority, with most of the roads being fairly easy to traverse, relatively speaking. It's your job to fix up those difficult-to-traverse patches with the equipment on hand, so that supply lines (driven by AI drivers) can deliver goods to where they need to go.
Unfortunately, I quickly found the work to become tedious. You first need to pour sand near the area you want to repair, so you'll need to drive a dump truck to the quarry to fill up with sand, then drive the dump truck to the road, deposit the sand, then get into a bulldozer, level the sand out, then go back into the dump truck, go back to the quarry to fetch more sand, drive back to the road, and rinse and repeat. In some cases, you need to do this a good 7 or 8 times. It becomes mind-numbing.
To combat this, the game allows you to hand over the task to the AI, but that, in turn, defeats the point of the game. You can just assign an AI to build the road, and they will, but then all you're doing is selecting a road to build and then selecting a truck to build it from the map, which isn't exactly much gameplay. The problem is, the AI doesn't play by the same rules as players have to (they have infinite sand, for example), so it's much quicker for the AI to build a road than the player, several times quicker, in fact. It's infuriating that you get punished for putting in all that hard work yourself.
The actual satisfying part comes from when the job is all finished and you get onto plotting the route for the AI vehicles to follow. This is a pretty neat feature, and probably the most interesting part of the game for me, personally. I like seeing the AI make use of the work I've done and watch them travel through a previously impassable part of the map. They're a bit stupid and follow your route exactly, so they can't maneuver around obstacles, even little rocks or barrels, so you have to make sure the route is fully clear before they travel along it.
I did encounter an issue as at the start of maps, you have no equipment available except your pickup. I had to plot a route from a depot to a garage to get it working so I could access my vehicles. Unfortunately, the road between the two was in a poor state, and no matter what I did, the AI truck could not find a path through, as it constantly got stuck in mud, making each attempt more difficult, essentially soft-locking me from continuing. The developers put a "reset map progress" button in, probably for this reason, but it does mean you lose all progress you've made on that map up to that point, which is annoying.
Occasionally, RoadCraft switches things up a bit, requiring you to remove objects such as wrecked cars and miscellaneous scrap from the roads using your bulldozer or a crane, this is less tedious work, but I am super clumsy and usually ended up destroying the terrain while clearing the scrap, meaning I needed to go and fix the road anyway!
Besides repairing and clearing roads, you'll also be tasked with transporting supplies, laying cables, and performing other assorted tasks to get communities back on their feet following natural disasters. This varies the gameplay up a little, but you are essentially driving from point A to point B. Laying cables is both the most interesting and possibly most frustrating task, as it involves digging trenches. Sometimes, you have to dig trenches across roads, meaning you now need to go back and lay a road again; otherwise, supplies can't get through. RoadCraft truly does require the patience of a saint.
I also found that sometimes object locations don't save. I cleared a road of debris to allow traffic through before saving and quitting. Upon reloading the game later, the debris was back on the road, preventing traffic. Terrain deformation also isn't always saved, it seems.
The game has co-op for up to 4 players. Unfortunately, with the way that RoadCraft is structured, you often only have 1 main objective to do at any one time, meaning in a 4-player game, at least 1 of the players is probably twiddling their thumbs wondering what to do. If your objective is to repair a pipeline, only 1 vehicle is needed to carry the pipe, maybe a secondary vehicle with a winch to pull it out of the mud if you get stuck, but what are the other 2 players meant to do for 15 minutes while they fix the pipeline? Nothing, it seems.
There isn't really an exploration element to RoadCraft, as there seemed to be in SnowRunner, so if you aren't doing an objective, there's no real point in going off the beaten track, as it were.
Visually, RoadCraft does look quite nice; it won't win any awards, but it certainly doesn't look bad, and when different weather effects roll in, it changes the overall atmosphere of the game quite well. Sound-wise, the game isn't as impressive, engine sounds quickly become irritating, and when using equipment like the bulldozer, you can hear specific audio files being played over and over; it's not great audio design. There is music in the game, but it's used sparingly as a sort of ambient sound that gets played occasionally and is very much in the background.
You'll also have plenty of content to get through, with 8 decent-sized maps, with increasingly complex terrain and objectives, plenty of vehicles to unlock, including bulldozers, cargo trucks, cable layers, cranes, steamrollers, dump trucks, and more!
I did have some graphical issues with the game on my PC, too. Textures sometimes did not load in fully, resulting in a blurry experience for several seconds before they loaded in, and I had flickering shadows. Hopefully, these issues will be fixed at launch.
RoadCraft runs reasonably well on the Steam Deck. We have good controller support, as well as 1280x800 as a resolution choice.
As for performance and settings, the game already applied the "Low" preset when it booted on my Steam Deck, and I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for out of the game. I also recommend you disable the "Mirrors" option that is left enabled on the Low Preset, too, or else using the cockpit view causes some serious slowdown. The game sets a 30 FPS in-game limit, so we don't need a frame limit set in SteamOS.
Using these settings, we can expect a somewhat stable 30 FPS. I did experience frame drops on occasion, as the CPU usage spikes and makes it vie for power with the GPU, causing drops to around 26 or 27 FPS from time to time, especially on foliage-dense maps. You also get occasional stutters. The game remains playable, though, and the FSR does a reasonable job of resolving a decent image, so it's not too bad to look at either.
Power draw is around 16 - 20W, so expect about 2.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED, and around 1.5 hours from an LCD. Temperatures were also around 65C-75C.
RoadCraft supports a wide variety of languages, and all voiced dialogue is subtitled. You can disable camera shake and rebind controls.
Is RoadCraft a bad game? Not necessarily, I could see how some people might enjoy it. For me, the game doesn't have the feeling of "survival" that SnowRunner has, where you are constantly trying to plan your own route and trying to protect your vehicle and preserve fuel, and because of the frustrating traversal and nature of the tasks at times, it isn't relaxing like American/Euro Truck Simulator. The game just feels rather... shallow, with similar objectives that take an age to complete, that you have to do over and over.
The best parts of the game are watching your AI Trucks use the path you built/cleared, and the off-road terrain physics and deformation remain as good as ever. Sadly, the terrain deformation is losing its luster after 5 games, and the rest of the mechanics RoadCraft introduces aren't robust enough to support the game.
RoadCraft is playable on the Steam Deck, although we do have to make some visual sacrifices, and performance still isn't fully stable. While it can be enjoyed, you might want to look elsewhere for the best experience.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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RoadCraft is an interesting concept that feels poorly executed. A shallow, yet frustrating experience. It is playable on the Steam Deck.
No Forced Compatibility
Display Resolution: 1280x800
Render Resolution: Performance
Resolution Upscaling: FSR3
Frame Generation: Off
V-Sync: Off
Motion Blur Intensity: Off
FPS Limit: 30
Quality Preset: Low
Then Disable "Mirrors"
Must have been a problem with your preview version - the release version of Roadcraft launches even faster on the deck than it does on PC, thanks to pre-compiled shaders with absolutely zero issues and default Proton.
Please update your review. 🙂