After nearly 500 hours of play, I've finally reached the end of the road. Roadcraft is done and dusted, fully 100%-ed (not something I tend to do with many games but this one kept.....tasking me!), with the whopping great big DLC levels also done. Without a pause for consideration, I am calling it - this is my Game of the Year 2025.
I thought it'd be good to spill my brains one more time about it (unless more DLC drops and I get drawn back in again, at the moment I don't think I could stand a FIFTH playthrough of it!) and pick over the good and bad of this utterly fascinating "Slow Game".
So let's kick off with the good. Grab yourself a cuppa, this might be a long post!
The Good: There are just so many different ways to play
I think above all else, this was the real 'draw' for me. When I first started playing, it felt like I was playing way too safe, trying to complete the objectives in the 'vanilla' way that the developers probably originally intended. By the third playthrough I realised I wasn't doing the game's relatively 'free reign' levels any justice, and began to experiment a lot more with what I could do with the range of vehicles (cleverly limited at first, but expanding as your experience levels build) to 'subvert' the usual ways of nailing those tasks.
Using a logger to haul steel beams around rather than recalling the RIGHT vehicle for the job? Basically tarmaccing over huge swathes of woodland and mud to make roads for those horrendously crappily underpowered big rigs? Building bridges pretty much EVERYWHERE, even up the side of buildings to nail objectives where you're supposed to pick your way daintily through the rubble? All that and more, and it's testament to the game's level designs and game engine that you could get away with treating each level like a true sandbox in terms of where you could drive and where you could place items. I think that's why I ended up playing through the whole thing four times, purely to see what I could get away with the next time to make things easier for my little roadcrew (building a bridge across the harbour in one particular map to cut out the whopping travel time from one part of the map to another really was a win!)
The Good: A truly awesome roster of vehicles, each with their own quirks and nuances but without the usual Saber "craziness" when it comes to controls.
It took a while to get used to the fact that Roadcraft didn't share Mud Runner or Snow Runner's weird gearbox shenanigans but it was a welcome change for me to have Roadcraft feature a 'simpler' control system. I think in all cases I just had diff lock and anti-slip stuff enabled all the time for everything, but there were times when sliding into low gear got me out of trouble.
I think the only times I struggled were with some of the cranes (swapping control schemes in my head for the cranes on rails vs the static cranes that pivoted on an axle) and the log loaders which were utterly horrible (and later on, largely dispensed with when some of the larger dump trucks got their own cranes).
I think I managed to try just about every vehicle in the game, and very quickly found that stuff like the Mule were pretty much indispensable, whereas stuff like the log haulers or loaders were utterly rubbish and useless. I even began to realise that the larger of the two tarmac layers was a bust for most levels, as the road rollers only had a fixed width and couldn't cope with the slightly wider roads that the bigger tarmac layer put down (plus the fucking thing was ALWAYS getting stuck in narrow spaces, so got binned). Saber did a great job of bringing in new vehicles (the DLC tracked dumper is pretty much the ONLY dumper to have in the game nowadays, the old wheeled ones are just rubbish in comparison). I never got the point of some of the vehicles (like the Mule with the support centre on it and other support centre vehicles) but it was great fun finding a solid core of fave vehicles that got used again and again.
The Good: Levels are huge, sprawling and gradually 'revealed' so the game makes you work for your progression.
Each level had a percentage goal that you'd only get 100% on if you completed all main and secondary tasks. Fair enough, but I could NOT believe how big the levels actually were, and how brilliantly designed they were too. Not just that, the 'learning curve / progression curve' was absolutely perfect, ensuring that you only got a handful of vehicles at the lowest experience level, later unlocking the better stuff later on in the game as you levelled up. I have yet to do a playthrough where I purposely left earlier levels 'incomplete' just to go back and breeze through them with better vehicles, so that'd be something for a fifth playthrough.
In all cases, the level design was balanced to be fair but quite often achingly punishing. For example, placing quarries and sandpits just at the very edge of their usefulness in a couple of cases, forcing you to drive your sand-grabbing dump truck quite some distance to be able to fill up (at least until you unlock that gigantic articulated sand monster thing I've totally forgotten the name of, even that couldn't be used everywhere though!)
I found myself quickly realising that forests were there to be trampled underfoot (under tyre!) and became 'rat runs' for quick shortcuts around the massive maps, avoiding nasty squelchy mudholes or deep water. I was pretty lazy with my scouting at first but effective use of your scouts does pay off, and at least shows you parts of the map that you might have missed otherwise, and ways to get from A to B a lot more efficiently than just using the well-trodden roads.
The difficulty levels really ramped up the more you progressed (and this is definitely the case with the DLC levels where they really weren't pissing around, and made them really tough right from the outset). But at all times it felt truly rewarding to complete a task that could sometimes have taken you an entire week's worth of gameplay to tick off your list. Slow gaming does get it in the neck at times but there's no finer sense of achievement in a game than finally completing a task that you've worked on for hour after hour.
OK now the not so good stuff:
The Bad: SO. MANY. BUGS.
Well it wasn't a total mess, but the very first time I encountered a really weird glitch, I found it somewhat amusing that the act of overloading a low-loading articulated lorry with concrete slabs could cause them to glitch up into the air where they menacingly hung for the duration of my first play through.
Later on in the game I found it a lot LESS amusing when certain game elements would 'glue' themselves into the scenery, or get irretrievably stuck. A couple of examples of this:
- A dock plate on one level that became lodged in the floor of a building you had to retrieve it on, with no crane in the game powerful enough to dislodge it (had to restart progress, the only way to 'fix' stuff on console, boooooo!
- A pipe that became wedged in the gap it was extracted from, and again couldn't be lifted by anything in the game because it was also on muddy ground (I lost count of how many vehicles I tipped over trying to get the bastard out before I just gave up, rammed it with a bulldozer until it sprang free!)
- Those LITTLE BASTARD ROCKS that could tip over a heavy mule on a whim, usually RIGHT at the point you were about to drop off a load, forcing you to respawn back at the garage and go and retrieve your lost cargo to try again (level designers' placement of those LITTLE BASTARD ROCKS was very clever though, to be fair).
- General glitchiness and crashes back to the dashboard. I think I lost count of how many times the early versions of the game crashed in this way.
- Terrible terrible AI drivers for the pathfinding tasks. Compensating for those dozy chumps lack of driving skills almost became a task in itself.
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