Restore industrial sites across the globe with the power of cranes and pavers

Announced at this year’s Geoffcom,RoadCraftis a new game courtesy of the vehicular bods behind MudRunner andSnowRunner. This means it’s very much a simulation game where you’re fighting terrain with tyres, except this time you aren’t just driving about, but managing a fleet of machines to carry out heavy construction work. Think a mixture of logistics, cars, cranes, and paving some lovely new roads from a once dilapidated junk heap.

RoadCraft looks to take Saber’s expertise in tricky terrain, and how vehicles react to that tricky terrain, by plugging it into more of a management sim. This means it’s more about pinging to and fro between your vehicles to repurpose mess into something pretty. You’ll take control of bulldozers to clear blocked paths, use transporters to carry vehicles out of sticky situations, and use cranes to lift bits and bobs with utmost precision. I’m particularly enamoured by the idea of spreading “hot asphalt using your paver”, then flattening it with a roller. There’s no way this isn’t the most satisfying thing in video games.

And as it’s construction-based, you’ll harvest resources like sand, wood, or tar to make the terrain suitable for your iron fleet. “Supply factories and sand quarries to ensure a continuous production of resources needed for roads and bridges”, says the press release. You might notice in the trailer, too, but you’ll also need to plot routes on a map so your vehicles don’t get in each other’s way. This suggests there’s an element of automation in the resource gathering side of things, alongside having direct control of vehicles. Only time will tell if you can whizz into the driver’s seat ofanyvehicle, or whether that’s reserved for a more specific thing.