More Roadcraft, more!

 

Roads? Where we're going we're going to need a LOT of roads!

I've been playing this for nearly a month now. Wow, hasn't the time flown by! So after the first few hours I blasted out a wee article about Roadcraft and thought I'd do some kind of a catchup thing because, amazingly, I'm still playing it. Almost obsessively playing it, in fact it's so horribly addictive that I'm beginning to piss everyone off in the house when they see me sitting there in front of the PS5 once again watching as a wrecked landscape is slowly brought back to life by a ton of lumbering machinery crawling at a snail's pace through inhospitable muck and foliage. 

Since I last wrote about it, I've realised that a ton of the appeal of Roadcraft comes from pushing the envelope of what the game allows (and it allows a LOT, I mean if you want to talk about an open-world game, this truly does let you wander all over the map tracing paths through bits the developers probably never really intended you to see, but have still lavished loving detail on). 

Picture a scenario from last night. I'm looking for four bits of a rocket booster that exploded over the flooded landscape I'm currently trying to restore. This harks back to Saber Interactive's previous game, Expeditions, where a lot of missions involved some kind of scout vehicle using a scanner to locate missing stuff. In Roadcraft they've honed this to perfection by shoving those lost bits and bobs into the most inaccessible places, so it takes a lot of puzzle-solving and strategic thinking to work out just how you're going to find those missing bits (and it's extremely rewarding when you do, and you realise that quite often they were right there on the map you just glanced at while trying to work out how to get from A to B). 

Can you dig it? Oh yeah...

The game also scores highly on the "Fuck, why didn't I do that EARLIER" stakes, when you realise that the road you've been happily crawling through, wheel deep in mud, that could really do with hard-topping (but you put it off because you're too distracted elsewhere) suddenly becomes a vital infrastructure route, forcing you to abandon your hopes of sending a couple of pansy trucks that couldn't mount a kerb without sputtering and dying through that mess. So out with the tipper truck, the bulldozer, the road roller and the asphalt layer and on with the road-creation show. I know it's all smoke and mirrors but I quite like the fact that sand, when poured in the game, is unpredictable and truculent and does not just lie flat ready for your asphalt just because you say so. So intricate crafting with the bulldozer to make the perfect flat surface becomes an art form (the less said about trying to get a lumbering tipper truck to drop its load in just the right place, the better!)

Yeah it ain't pretty but it can do a heck of a lot, the infamous Mule!

The last thing of note about the game is that it quite happily sits back and lets you try to take the piss with certain missions. The truck pictured above, the Mule, comes with a crane variant which you will find yourself using again, and again, and again - purely because it's much more convenient to fetch up at a scene with a speedy little truck with a crane attached than drag a more meaty truck or flatbed along with a separate crane. So the poor Mule ends up being the carrier for loads it really can't cope with (but you're going to try anyway). Seeing the poor thing over-laden with a gigantic transformer, then trying to drive it without it doing the one thing you'll come to hate the most - tipping over on your side in the middle of nowhere with your precious load, forcing you to recover your truck but leave the load where it is - becomes a superb challenge that only the faint hearted will shy away from. I've had the thing moving bloody great big sections of metal pipe, slung sideways across the back, and gleefully recycled that pipe to make lots of baby pipes all at once, which is where the game trades frustration for dopamine and makes you even more risk-prone with your next mission loadouts. 

All in all there are fine moments in the game where you can really see the developers cackling away in your minds eye as they craftily craft the craftiest landscape, roadscape and devastated urban environs to trip you up (or tip you over). So if anything, despite some of the technical shoddiness (the hideous framedrops when the game auto saves, the fact that it ONLY autosaves which means you have to wait until it does so when it's quitting time, or risk losing your mission progress, some of the artifact pop-in which - admittedly - does show the levels of detail in the game but does also annoy when you're driving along a road and leaf / twig litter is literally appearing right before the nose of your vehicle) Saber Interactive deserve to win awards for turning their previous "Mudrunner" staples into a game filled with puzzle perfection and immense satisfaction. 

Then there's all the hidden stuff. What are those mini vehicles you keep finding all over the place? Why on earth did a rocket explode over a flooded landscape? Why am I still playing this game so obsessively even though in a lot of cases the missions are pretty much identical variants of each other?

Once again, and I don't say this lightly, it's got my GOTY award written all over it despite all this. So the only way you're going to know for sure is to try it yourself.