RoadCraft review – build unfinished roads in an unfinished game

There’s something incredibly relaxing about dumping sand, flattening it, tarmacking, and steamrolling it into a road as twangy Americana strums away in the background. I’ve lost hours chatting with friends as we restore the infrastructure of towns devastated by natural disasters, from earthquakes to hurricanes, filling up holes in the earth and making messed up topography fit for a semi truck. 

RoadCraft feels like a natural evolution of the MudRunner series – an open sandbox filled with intentional player friction that rewards patience and creativity. Every map you visit begins as a complete mess, full of holes to fill, broken roads to fix, and debris to sweep away. At its best, it taps into what makes games like House Flipper so engaging – a digital colouring book that lets you colour outside the lines. It’s just a shame the holes in the maps you explore aren’t the only ones that need filling. 

Every single play session, the audio breaks and the sound of your vehicle engine stops playing, which takes some of the fun out of driving a 50-ton beast. It’s triggered by switching vehicles, which you do constantly, and can only be fixed by reloading the entire lobby. There are also entire sections of the map where my 5070 Ti chugged along at sub-30fps for no apparent reason. Then there are those semis. 

As you’d guess from the name, RoadCraft is all about building roads to transport goods and set up logistics. It's GTA 6 for people who still get excited when they see a fire engine. The endgame of each map is making it completely drivable with a fully loaded semi, which otherwise gets bogged down in mud and sand because of its sheer weight. 

There’s a truckload of dynamic physics stuff needed to set this up. First, you park the semi up near some slabs of concrete or whatever you’re hauling, then you bring a crane over and manually load it up before strapping it on. Each item has its own physics and weight, and strapping them on stops them from jostling around as you take corners, supposedly 

Except it often doesn’t work properly. The telltale sign is twerking. If you see your semi shaking its long butt or bouncing up and down seductively, no matter what society might have taught you about human mating rituals, you’re about to have a bad time. One minute it’s shaking dat thang, and the next, it’s shooting through the air like a deranged Chinese dragon, damaging all the infrastructure you’ve set up and tearing trees up by their roots like a pubescent Godzilla. 

It’s funny the first time it happens. The second, third, and fourth times? Not so much. You end up losing the cargo, which you have to re-source by lugging resources to a depot, and you have to crane lift all of it back onto a new semi and start the entire journey again. 

Every time this happens, you lose hours of progress. It’s happened to me while loading stuff onto a semi, when I slightly touched something while driving, and when trying to recover a semi with a crane after accidentally tipping it over. There’s no way the developers didn’t know about these bugs. 

It’s a huge shame because it’s otherwise brilliant. While it’s a relative of the MudRunner series, playing RoadCraft reminded me of Death Stranding. As well as scanning the scenery to check the danger level of the topography you need to drive across, it has the same freeform approach to traversal, where you can set up smart shortcuts with a bit of extra work, and the early work you do often pays off later when you have to return to a place you’ve already set up. Instead of the strand system, you can play in real-time with your friends, so you get instant feedback when you create an inventive solution to a roadblock. 

On one map, we cleared a swamp and knocked over trees to build a new road that saved a five-minute drive between depots. In another, we placed a bridge from a railyard to a castle, preventing our AI delivery vehicles from having to wind across the entire map. 

But even this creative expression gets undermined by the game. By the fifth map, my pals and I had it down. We built roads everywhere, working across the large map in grids to set the entire thing up for deliveries we knew we’d have to make down the line. Except the game doesn’t realise you’ve done this and will often ask you to build a road somewhere you’ve already built one. 

Then there’s the AI, which is as stupid as those guys on Twitter who reply “Grok, what does this mean?” under every single post. Once you’ve got a road set up, you have to plan a route for AI deliveries, and these guys will drive in circles for no reason, veer into walls, struggle to turn simple corners, and fail routes they’ve previously aced for no reason. 

RoadCraft is a great concept that needs at least another year of development. In a few patches, it’ll be the best game of its type, but it’s impossible to fully recommend with its sentient semis, borked physics, idiotic AI, and base technical issues. 

When I first started playing, I made a few mistakes. Instead of preparing the map for later, I’d build the roads as I needed them, sometimes even as I’m attempting to drive them, filling them with sand to push my vehicle out of the mud it was stuck in. It feels like the publisher is happy for the developer to do the same thing instead of paving over the imperfections before launch.