RoadCraft Review (PS5)

It seems like an absolute age since we first sat down to sample Pavel Zagrebelnyy's inspired off-road sim, Spintires, when we first caught wind of it back in 2014 and, even then, this intricate and hugely challenging slice of driving action felt as though there was something very special in its unique, almost puzzle-esque mixture of unforgiving mud obstacles and strict resource management. There was a deeply addictive core to this game that raised it way beyond any rough edges and jankiness. Of which there were plenty.

Mudrunner, a flashy sequel by Saber Interactive (with Zagrebelnyy now on the team), and its excellent follow-up, SnowRunner, then took this idea of spinning around in the mud in decrepit old vehicles — while pulling your hair out and cursing your children — and ran with it.

Of course, we then had 2024's Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, which we now know, having played through the excellent RoadCraft, was just the first movement in a shift to something much more involving from the devs. Expeditions gave us a more open and impressive world, for starters, something you'd actually want to go discover and explore, rather than a landscape to be seen purely as difficult. It also brought scouting, camping, and proper management of tools and tech in order to push on through a much wider array of problems. The puzzle/driving series had advanced into something that encompassed more than just what was going on with your car in some muddy fields.

And so it's a very clever follow-up, this RoadCraft malarkey, because it takes the idea of using tools and managing resources, survival stuff basically — the genesis of all fear — and weaves it into this rather exciting premise of navigating, cleaning up, and restoring areas after scary natural disasters have hit.

It's a perfect fit, as it gives you exciting excuses to drive your big, cumbersome, fully customisable trucks around until they get stuck in crap again, and it also lets you get busy using all-sorts of gizmos, doodahs and antique service vehicles to tarmacadam roads, resupply electricity and gas, build bridges, and clear debris. Yep, you name it, sunshine, and we here at Hideous Corp (you get to name your own disaster rescue company, so we went with something non-sinister), can get it to where you need it. Once we turn this dozer back over the right way, you understand.

In RoadCraft you've got eight maps (with more due via DLC) to set about fixing up and reconnecting damaged areas throughout. Saber Interactive has been keen to point out that this adventure, which is built on an impressively tactile new version of their in-house 'Swarm' engine, isn't a sequel of any sort to what's come before, too, given that it lets you interact with and manipulate your environs like never before.

Some say it's like a big toybox full of your old Tonka stuff brough to life, and we get that. You've got a fleet of 40-odd vehicles to play with in RoadCraft, and every one is meticulously realised in both function and form — note, there are some very impressive cockpits in this game. You get to move big diggers and dozers around to clear paths of busted cars and trees, jump into huge cranes to carefully load all manner of pipes and concrete, and move items to-and-fro across terrain that's seen rockslides, hurricanes, floods, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff happen. These folk should just move to the UK, nothing like this happens here. It could be a DLC easy mode.

The very same intricate play that you'll find in SnowRunner et al is intact, then, that deep and addicting core that's seen these sims become so popular, and accumulate such a dedicated following, over the years. It's one of those things, from personal experience, that may seem off-putting at first — it's slow and it's taxing — but once you're in the zone with these games, it's very hard to stop playing. A delicate balance in frustration and exhilaration has been struck, you see, they've nailed the joy of managing to complete a ruinously difficult task, one that makes you (for some weird evolutionary reason, we're sure) feel like a right old Jimmy Big Brains, just because you used a digger (in sand-flattening mode, to be precise) to push a wrecked port-a-loo off a road into a ditch. Humans are weird.

It's the quiet complexity with which the game allows you to do these things, though, that really makes it all sing. How a crane controls so carefully, with feather touches lest things go awry. The way that you can feel your wheels spin and strain in a deep stretch of mud as you winch yourself out, or the weight and heft of controlling a heavy steamroller across uneven sand because you went the wrong way. Again. This is the good stuff. And now we're adding all these nice tactile layers, like making bridges — which snap magnetically into place and then auto-build pleasingly as you arrive with the required materials. It's a change that immediately renders the older games just that little bit less appealing.

Besides making bridges, you'll also need to reconnect supplies for electricity, clear forested areas with a great big yellow tree-murderer, and pull up snazzy schematics to follow routes and clear damage. Heck, you even get to fix broken gas pipelines by collecting up colour-coded debris to escort to recycling plants and make new pipe joints. How exciting! It makes for puzzles within puzzles that need to be solved with each new objective. How to get to the location you're needed at, which vehicles are required, how to fix the way as you go, the organisation, collection and delivery of materials — it gets more complex as it progresses. And so it's lucky that Saber is now such a dab-hand at making it all flow so smoothly.

As you push out across these broken landscapes, you'll unlock bases at which you can store, recall, and buy new vehicles at the in-game shop. Bases can then be used as quick access to your fleet, cutting down on repeat trips, and essentially acting as fast-travel (there's also a cool truck that lets you spawn vehicles remotely at a cost). You can zoom immediately into the cockpit of any of your deployed vehicles by using the map, too, which is nice. Materials also get shared across stores, but you'll need to take charge of ensuring you do the stocking up! For something with so many moving parts, it's quite the thing how well it all works. Mostly.

There are a few niggles here and there, chief among which is an external camera that, at times, can be a bit of a pain when you're trying to see the entire motion and range of something huge, like a crane. It's not a killer issue, but if feels as though we could be doing with a way to zoom out just a touch so we can mitigate this. There were also a bunch of times that materials, such as concrete slabs, would have a bit of a glitch-out on the end of a rope. Again, nothing major and, quite honestly, to be expected in many ways, with something so complex.

We should also say at this point, that this is one of the best-looking games we've played on our consoles in ages, at times. It may not be the most AAA-stunning thing you'll ever see, fair enough, but catch a sunset in just the right way or drive through lush forests during a rainstorm, and it's very hard not to be very impressed. In fact, scratch that, it's pretty much AAA-stunning most of the time.

There's lots of fancy deformation effects at work, sand moves quite realistically from a tipper as you dump it out, and the reflections and volumetric effects work overtime to give us landscapes that genuinely do look utterly wrecked. We're not sure we've ever seen more debris floating about in a game, there's so much detail in these environs. And so all these things then combine with the intricate loops of scouting and fixing, the joy of cleaning up and doing a good job, all set to an oddly evocative soundtrack, to make for a right rip-roaring time, actually. It's all very intense and engrossing, if you submit to it.

Sometimes the vibe here is genuinely more Death Stranding than the Digger Championship 2025-styled affair that you may have been expecting, in all honesty. As you settle into an exacting and concentrated rhythm, jumping into your scout jeep to slowly and carefully uncover a treacherous section of map, pushing back against the elements until you reach your first base, thus creating a foothold to push on further. It's definitely got some of those same quiet, meditative vibes as you struggle alone against nature to reconnect points. Well, sort of alone.

RoadCraft also allows you to automate and dictate jobs out to a bot crew, creating routes between points to deliver goods, once you've cleared the way, and this adds yet another very fun aspect, even if it's just on the level of having other vehicles on the road to make traps for and get road-rage at.

We should note here that we do have one small complaint to make with regards to this automated route-planning process though as, no matter how careful we were in placing routes on our map, vehicles did tend to get stuck quite often, so you have to jump into your menus and cycle over to reposition or clear routes a lot. It does feel like this could be dialled back a bit, as it can push you over the edge of sanity when it occurs just as you're wrestling with an upturned crane truck in a rockslide. Such is life.

With a huge campaign packed full of side objectives, and given that the whole thing is playable with up to three other people in multiplayer, this is easily the dev's most ambitious off-road sim-styled project to date, overall, and it's one that fulfils the potential of earlier outings in this vein. Yes, it's different enough that some fans may prefer to stick to the older games — there's no micromanagement of fuel and things here, so some may see that as a bit of a dilution of the formula — but it's also the best of the lot in terms of variety, fun and spectacle.

If you've yet to try any of Saber Interactive's "Runner" titles, we reckon RoadCraft is a new high-point for the dev, even if it's not officially part of the series overall. It takes the essence of what makes MudRunner and SnowRunner so endlessly replayable, and very carefully redirects it into a much bigger thing, adding discovery, excitement, and the spectacle of huge storms as a driver to keep pushing you forward through the mud and the crap.