izigame.me

RoadCraft is Retaliation from Mudpits.

Fellow SnowRunner (the noun), are you sick and tired of constantly getting stuck in the mud, ice, deceptively deep waters, and slightly disturbed stretches of dirt? Are you tired of rebuilding an entire infrastructure around a settlement that seems to have been planned by a 5-year-old, only to see little to no difference despite your herculean efforts? Are you exhausted from going above and beyond to deliver a literal building on wheels, only to get paid just enough to cover the fuel you burned getting it there?
If this sounds familiar, then RoadCraft is the game for you.
The Premise
When I played the demo for RoadCraft two months ago, my first impression honestly wasn't that great. I went in expecting a SnowRunner with road crafting and resource management features. What I actually got was a game about rebuilding a region hit by natural disasters — focused on the latter two features I just mentioned — and not the delivery-oriented gameplay through quagmire-infested lands.
And honestly, that kind of gameplay can get boring and tiresome sometimes, even for a Spintires aficionado like me and my friends.
Once I understood what the game was really about, I was able to dissociate from my yearning for an expanded SnowRunner and open up to the new world of RoadCraft.
The Good
Honestly? Pretty much the entire gameplay loop.
While SnowRunner has its moments of accomplishment, that game is basically the Dark Souls of driving sims. The level design is great at encouraging problem-solving, but there are stretches — especially in the DLC maps — that just feel like the devs are venting their frustrations on the players by designing the most diabolical and remote hellscapes mankind has ever seen.
In RoadCraft, you progress much faster than in SnowRunner. The quests feel more rewarding, they have clear impacts on the world, and you spend more time actually doing things instead of just holding "W" and swerving left and right hoping to gain traction. In the six hours I’ve played so far, I’ve never felt like the devs were artificially stalling me by putting a mudpit between me and my objective — and even if they did, I could solve it with sand and asphalt.
In SnowRunner, I’ve spent 10 to 15 hours on a single map, only to keep getting slowed down by the same mudpit I’ve crossed 30 times already — that actually gets worse the more I pass over it. Not anymore.
In RoadCraft, you can remove rocks, dump sand into mudpits or water, pave over them, build bridges — either using the in-game bridge tool or by dumping a small country's worth of sand and marveling as the real-time sand physics take form before your eyes.
As I mentioned above, the game also features resource management. You recycle debris left by the natural disaster: rocks and rubble become concrete blocks; pipes, scrapped car parts, and corrugated metal become new materials. Fuel is used to revive broken-down facilities, and more. And once you've built roads, you can assign routes for NPC trucks to transport cargo and resources, giving you a real sense of team effort — and some company, which was often lacking in earlier titles.
And best of all: I experienced all of this in multiplayer. No flying vehicles, no desyncs, flawless matchmaking, no physics havok (pun intended), and shared map and vehicle progress. Just an honestly great experience.
The Not-So-Good...
While it might sound like I dunked on SnowRunner earlier, I actually love that game — just like I loved the original Spintires. And what I think will keep me coming back to SnowRunner, even after the launch of RoadCraft, is the sheer connection with the vehicles.
In SnowRunner, vehicles feel heavy. They twist the chassis, they get dirty, you see all the bits and pieces move, the suspension compresses when you load cargo, and you can hear the clicks and clacks of the flatbed railings and springs. You can damage your truck on a perilous path, mangle it on an off-camber trail, and watch both vehicle and cargo tumble down a mountain. You can feel the vehicles in SnowRunner — even through a monitor, and I just don’t get that feeling from RoadCraft at all.
In a word, the vehicles in RoadCraft feel: stiff. They don’t bounce, they don’t react much to terrain imperfections, and the suspension just doesn’t behave like it does in a Spintires-style game. There's also no fuel consumption (though that’s apparently coming in a future mode), no manual gearbox, and no vehicle damage system. All this contributes to what’s clearly a more friendly, arcade-style, and console-oriented experience. It’s designed to appeal to a broader audience — despite still being pretty niche.
But for those of us who got hooked back in the original Spintires days (which seems to be a large portion of the fanbase), a future mode with fuel consumption, manual gearboxes, and a damage system similar to SnowRunner would definitely be a welcome addition.
Last but Not Least: The Performance
A friend of mine, who has a better PC than I do, just couldn’t play the game. He ran the demo perfectly, but the full release completely faceplanted — no clear reason why.
I’ve seen other reviews mention this too: people with RTX 4090s getting less than 30 FPS, while others with 3060s manage 45–50 FPS. Sadly, this seems like yet another game that’s taken a ride on the badly optimized PC launch train we’ve seen way too often in the last five years.
Personally, I didn’t experience any major issues aside from minor frame drops lasting about 2 seconds here and there. I’m running an aging i7-7700K, RTX 3070, and 32GB RAM — so I guess it’s hit or miss at the moment.
With that in mind: if you’re interested in the game and are okay with asking for a refund later — or just waiting for patches — I can definitely recommend RoadCraft.