I was convinced my appetite for mud was sated after hundreds of hours in SnowRunner—and Expeditions all but confirmed that Saber Interactive was spinning its wheels. RoadCraft flips that assumption. Yes, the mud’s still there, but this time you turn it into asphalt. After fifteen hours I’ve filled canyons with sand, built my first bridge, and discovered an off-road sim that punishes far less…but rewards far more creativity.
Picture SnowRunner meeting a lightweight city-builder: you still wrestle the wilderness, but now you reshape it. Saber Interactive blends extreme driving with heavy-construction gameplay; publisher Focus calls it “sim-craft.” New genre? Maybe. At the very least it’s a new sandbox for people who love oversized machinery.
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Gameplay
| A satisfyingly chunky Clear → Produce → Build loop; terrain is far more forgiving than SnowRunner. |
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Tech
| Fully current-gen visuals, rock-solid 30 fps, excellent DualSense integration. |
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Multiplayer
| Drop-in four-player co-op = instant laughs; convoy AI is still comedy-grade. |
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Progression
| Simple economy, light customization, no real company management yet. |
The menu greets you with the motto “Fix the world, one job at a time.” The lean tutorial dumps you into a flood-ravaged canyon and hands you a dozer. Every bucketful of debris becomes a fleeting sculpture; every track mark stays. Two hours later I park atop my ribbon of fresh asphalt curling beside the river—and feel something SnowRunner never gave me: pride in the landscape I just created.
DualSense notes: Triggers groan under 30 tons, haptics change with surface type. UI text scales, full remap available; no color-blind presets yet.
RoadCraft ditches MudRunner’s old engine for the Swarm Engine, and it shows. Draw distance is huge; forests, pylons and crags stay razor-sharp all the way to the horizon. Volumetric clouds tear apart in wind gusts; storms liquefy dirt in real time, puddles fill, and dynamic lighting dances on fresh tarmac. At dawn, dust motes spin in your headlights; foliage bends under squalls.
4 K Quality mode stays locked at 30 fps with HDR pop; only autosave stutters break the flow, and I clocked zero crashes in fifteen hours—a 2025 miracle. Region hops load in ±25 seconds, just time for a sip of coffee.
Bulldozer, loader, crane: every beast handles differently. I levelled an entire pine forest, poured sand, then rolled asphalt through it—pointless, therefore essential. Expect time-lapse “before/after” videos to flood YouTube.
Spread gravel, compact, pave. The colour shifts, grip changes—the eureka moment when terrain stops being the enemy and becomes your canvas. Early missions steer you to GPS-fixed sites; the game’s at its best once it lets you go wild.
Restarting an asphalt plant needs fuel, spare parts and convoy deliveries, then a mini management game of feed rates. No big production dashboard yet—you juggle menus. Just deep enough to fund new toys, not deep enough for sim-tycoons.
In SnowRunner a bad shortcut could eat three hours and half your truck roster. RoadCraft forgives more: ground compacts fast, the winch gathers dust, mishaps last minutes, not evenings. Masochists will moan; I call it tempo. The game would rather you dream in asphalt than pitch a rescue camp.
About forty machines split three ways:
Unlike SnowRunner, none carry real-world badges. No Western Star, no CAT—only credible fictional brands like Aramatsu or Bowhead. The difference is mechanical, not cosmetic:
Personalisation & upgrades? Bare-bones: solid-colour paint, a company logo, a handful of tyre types. No gearboxes, suspension swaps or crane upgrades like SnowRunner. A future patch (or DLC) bringing back mechanical tuning would thrill min-maxers.
One glaring omission worth noting: unlike Farming Simulator 25, there’s no option to ‘hire’ AI drivers to handle repetitive tasks or retrieve distant machinery.
Currently, your only relief comes from a limited fast-travel system that lets you summon specific vehicles once you’ve positioned a support truck. It works, but lacks the satisfaction of building a proper company with workers you can assign to tasks while you focus on the creative aspects of reshaping the landscape.
This feature alone would elevate RoadCraft from an excellent simulation to a genuine construction empire builder. Although during road request mission, you can let the AI handle the road craft.
Plot a line, hit GO, sip coffee—until one sloppy bend sends the convoy into slapstick carnage. Five tippers nose-down in a ravine: hilarious, then irritating. Wide curves and an “escort dozer” cut losses, but route-finding desperately needs a patch.
One hour in public co-op: three strangers, one drill rig, infinite giggles when I flipped the load ten yards from the quay. Cash and inventory sync for everyone; the host alone decides whether the world state persists. We’ll see how servers and AI sync hold up on launch day.
Roadmap: Focus teases a New Game + / Hardcore Mode (fuel + damage), a map editor with console mod support, and a Rebuild Pack DLC this autumn (new region + licensed gear?). The worksite’s only getting bigger.
| You are… | You’ll get… |
|---|---|
| A SnowRunner die-hard | The same physics plus the power to build. |
| A Construction/Farming Sim fan | A triple-A physics engine for your jobsite fantasies. |
| A casual explorer | Friendly tutorial, generous checkpoints, shorter “stuck” time. |
| A hardcore truck masochist | Wait for Hardcore mode and modded rigs. |
RoadCraft isn’t SnowRunner 2. It’s SnowRunner that traded its winch for a concrete mixer—and it works. Laying blacktop where a storm once howled is downright therapeutic. Co-op could be legendary once convoy AI grows up; progression and tuning need flesh on their bones. But for a day-one build this stable, Saber’s poured a fine slab of concrete.
Stay tuned: we’ll revisit the score once we’ve hammered late-game maps, Hardcore, and mod support.
(Stay tuned: we’ll revisit the score once we’ve hammered late-game maps, Hardcore, and mod support.)
A Key Review was provided by Focus Entertainment, but rest assured that our review is without biais. We truly liked the game so far.