If you haven't played MudRunner or SnowRunner, it might be difficult to convey the appeal of what could best be described as a vehicular survival game - one where you work your way across vast stretches of off-road landscape and try not to get stuck in the most gloriously viscous mud you'll ever see in a video game. The Steam Next Fest demo for RoadCraft, developer Saber Interactive's next follow-up, is suffering "mixed" reviews from series fans who think it's not hardcore enough, but my 40 minutes with the demo were absolutely harrowing.
RoadCraft deliberately dispenses with some elements of the formula from previous games, like vehicle damage and fuel, but you're still going to be driving through a whole lot of indescribably muddy roads. The demo's first objective simply asks you to drive an SUV across the map, and it took all of five minutes for me to get that car flipped upside down in about 10 feet of mud. Luckily, you can always "recover" your vehicle to its spawn point.
Once you reach that destination, you've got to cut down a few trees with a tree processor - a type of machinery I did not realize the existence of until today. Nudge the treaded vehicle toward a tree, wrap its claws around a tree, and it'll chop the thing down and strip it of every branch. This was probably the easiest part of the demo.
Then came the hard part: loading all those logs into a trailer. This truck is equipped with a crane you can use to individually pick up and drop in harvested logs, and offers full control over that crane's vertical, horizontal, and lateral movement. It's a lot of precise movement, and it's fiddly as all heck. Getting just one log onto the trailer was a palm-sweating dexterity test that took me way longer than I'd care to admit, and then I had to do it twice more to actually complete my objective. Folks, but the time I had hauled that load - consisting of precisely three logs - across the map, I was straight-up hootin' and hollerin'.
I had a great time with the RoadCraft demo, though more hardcore SnowRunner fans than me have dropped the demo to a 55% positive "mixed" rating on Steam, largely complaining about the absence of the preceding game's more advanced mechanics. RoadCraft isn't quite so survival-focused as its predecessors, though, as it's much more concerned with logistics and, well, crafting roads.
The later stages of the demo - which I sadly didn't have time to get to - delve into those road-building mechanics more deeply, and the gameplay trailer above offers some impressive hints at what you'll be able to do. It looks like RoadCraft is set to offer a literal sandbox where you can just drop piles of dirt to build your own bridges or more substantial roads, literally terraforming the map to suit your needs. The prospect of doing it all in four-player co-op makes that pitch even more interesting, and we'll see how it all comes together when RoadCraft hits PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on May 20.
