RoadCraft Preview – Where we’re going, we need to build roads

thesixthaxis.com:

RoadCraft is the video game equivalent of playing in a sandbox with a bunch of bright yellow diggers and trucks. Sure, it’s got its roots in the often torturous terrain traversal of the MudRunner series, but once you get into the swing of the reconstruction tasks it sets you, it really starts to feel like you’re a big kid and your mates have come round to play.

Of course, there’s no need to really engage your imagination here, conjuring up mental imagery of imagined disasters, or making mechanical or engine noises as you smash plastic into sand or dirt – RoadCraft has all these bases covered.

We played an opening scenario featured in the new Steam Next Fest demo – available for all from 24th February – dropping into a region that has been devastated by a tornado rolling through – how inconvenient! The power is out, the roads are flooded, and the terrain is only just the right side of a boggy swamp.

The first job is figuring out that you need to disengage the handbrake on your 4×4, and turn on AWD and split diff so that you can actually drive places without spinning your wheels deeper and deeper into the mud. Also, I inadvertently hooked my tow cable to a tyre and was dragging that around for five minutes before realising why I was randomly veering to the right – Look, it’s my first time actually playing these games, but I did eventually catch up to Dom, who knows his MudRunners like the back of his muddy hands.

Once we finally reached the first objective, picking our way through the woods and skirting flood waters, we got stuck in with the meaty terrain-altering vehicles that the game puts at your disposal. Swapping between vehicles from the world map is about as seamless as it gets, at which point you can dive straight into the task at hand – this first job being to clear an area of trees and stumps to make way for future work.

I forget their actual names, but for this one job we had to make use of Choppy the tree murderer, who can effortlessly cut a tree, spin it on