RoadCraft

Written by Jason Dailey on 5/19/2025 for PS5  

The simulator genre is not for everyone, with its penchant for meticulous tasks that, admittedly, sometimes border on tedium. It can be difficult for sims to find a properly balanced gameplay formula that is both entertaining and true to the source material. RoadCraft has managed to pull it off – at least for this simmer – but with its DNA as a MudRunner game, it may be a bridge too far for some construction sim fans due to the rigidity of certain gameplay systems. But just like its muddy roads, the more I played RoadCraft, the deeper I found myself sinking into its charms.

RoadCraft sees you starting up your own disaster recovery company and responding to natural disaster cleanup at various locales across eight campaign missions. You can be a one-person army or invite up to three friends to join you in drop-in/drop-out cooperative sessions. I founded Gaming Nexus Restoration, complete with an orange paint job for my vehicles, and from there, began cleaning up and rebuilding wherever duty called across the globe. Eight campaign missions may not sound like much, but when most have dozens of main objectives, on top of several side objectives, there is a lot of content in RoadCraft. Hours upon hours upon hours of content, in fact.

You can certainly have marathon play sessions and grind out objective after objective, but my favorite way to play was an hour or two at a time. Playing it in smaller chunks turned it into a somewhat cozy experience for me. I’d pop in and lay a stretch of road, install some power cable, or haul a load of materials across the map then step away for a while and go back. I treated it like a job, almost roleplaying as a construction contractor, showing up for work each day to knock out a couple of tasks on the project at large. And for the most part, it was a relaxing time.

Don’t get me wrong, however – this game is challenging. I’ve joked with my Gaming Nexus teammates that RoadCraft is the Dark Souls of construction sims. I’m being facetious, but there are so many moving parts that when you have a breakthrough, it feels like a huge accomplishment. Be it successfully mapping a supply delivery route after multiple failed attempts, or discovering that you can rotate crane loads, little wins often feel like big ones.

That’s largely because of that MudRunner DNA that I mentioned earlier. RoadCraft employs a similar gameplay engine that features real-time terrain deformation and impressive vehicle physics that can prove to be a real challenge. You’ll have to consider what gear to operate in (high or low), whether to turn on all-wheel drive, and if wheel differential lock should be on or off – all of which depends on the terrain itself. If the ground is wet, it becomes a sloppy mess as you try to traverse it, which forces you to alter your approach, or risk getting stuck altogether.

Getting stuck can mean having to start over by respawning your vehicle back at a base, which at times is halfway across the map. And then there are the unhinged occasions where your multi-thousand-pound piece of equipment flips over after running over a shopping cart. It’s like dying in a Souls game and waking up at the last campfire you stopped at, but instead of having to fight your way back through all those demons you just murdered, you need to find a better way to re-navigate all the ground you just covered.

RoadCraft will drive you crazy if you let it. Early on, I was dragging a generator around and kept getting hung on objects – even barrels in the mud – which led to a couple of moments where I had to pause the game and walk away. The game wants you to literally grind it out. After all, each map has been devastated by a natural disaster, and it’s not supposed to be easy to do the job you were sent there to do.

I eventually came to respect and appreciate its physics and terrain deformation systems once I better understood what the game was expecting from me. As time wore on, I must say that adding those systems to the typical heavy machinery operating takes construction sims to new heights.

Once I fully wrapped my mind around its gameplay, the next hurdle to unlock maximum enjoyment was getting past the default machinery that is given to you. Once I had made enough cash to buy better vehicles, things really started to click. For instance, after using both a flatbed truck and crane truck in tandem to load and haul steel pipes around, I discovered the cargo crane truck – a handy do-it-all loader and hauler combo that made life so much easier.

That’s pretty much the case across the board where the vehicles you can buy are far better suited to handling the terrain and tasks at hand than the basic trucks. Typically, premium options have better handling, or more cargo weight capacity, and the like.

With more than 40 vehicles available to unlock and use, there are plenty of tools in your toolbox, including dump trucks, dozers, cranes, saw trucks, asphalt pavers, and more. Getting a new piece of equipment to tackle a new job was always a joy, and the pacing of new tasks and equipment being introduced is excellent. Despite having dozens of objectives and hours of gameplay, it does give you time to grow into it before dumping something new on you.

With that many pieces of equipment to operate, it was a little difficult to establish muscle memory in terms of each vehicle’s control scheme. Attaching a crane boom to a load was not the same button across cranes, for example, which means you’ll be relying on the on-screen button prompts quite a bit as you bounce around each piece of equipment.

With that said, RoadCraft handles very well on a console controller, especially considering how many inputs each vehicle has. For instance, operating a crane requires you to simultaneously control the rotation of the boom, extension range of the boom, vertical movement, and load movement, to get an object placed exactly where you need it. It’s meticulous, but it scratches that simulator itch so well.

Speaking of meticulous, every vehicle has been painstakingly designed both inside and out. I was always excited to jump into the cockpit camera of a new vehicle to admire the detail that had been put in. In addition to form, there’s also the function of each vehicle. Each has multiple moving parts that can be manipulated by the player, and I can’t say that any corners have been cut, in terms of vehicle design and operation. It’s clear that RoadCraft has been a labor of love for the development team.

While it is easy to swap between vehicles, it is not always convenient to do so. You can jump between them by locating them on the map and pressing one button, which you’ll be doing a lot. Playing in co-op with partners drastically improves the workflow, allowing you and your friends to coordinate efforts to make tasks much more efficient.

Playing solo is a completely viable option and is how I played most of the time, but there’s no denying that the experience significantly improves with more operators on the team, if for nothing more than the camaraderie. Everything happens in real time playing in co-op, with you able to see exactly where each person is on the map and what they’re doing. Vehicles are shared but limited to whatever the hosting player has in their garage, though strangely, resources don’t appear to be shared unless acquired within that play session. A Gaming Nexus colleague and I were playing one night, and he could not recall a vehicle to my mobile base because he did not have access to my fuel stock, which forced us to swap vehicles so that I could take care of it myself.

For a game so heavy on mechanics, I found RoadCraft to be a delightfully cozy experience. I enjoyed solving its environmental puzzles, trying to fit everything on a truck, operating the various equipment, or successfully plotting a supply line. Although it presents a unique challenge compared to other simulators, it adeptly marries the tranquility of a construction sim with the grit-and-grind of the MudRunner and SnowRunner games. Yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also fair. Wait a minute – maybe it is the Dark Souls of construction sims.

RoadCraft is laborious, hypnotic, meticulous, gorgeous, grindy, and cozy. The fact that it can be – and often is – all those things at once means this is a remarkable construction simulation. A MudRunner game has finally clicked for me, and though it doesn’t claim to be one, there’s no denying its heritage, even if it is more accessible than the games that came before it.