RoadCraft isn't just another demanding offroad sim for petrol heads – it sated my desire to micromanage production lines too

I didn't think natural disaster remediation would be this relaxing. When I first booted up RoadCraft, a game about performing clean-up jobs with heavy vehicles, I was plunged into a reflective mood by the plangent, melancholy guitar licks that better evoke crackling campfires and copious whiskey than they do mud and exhaust fumes. The mood doesn't let up as I lurch through a post-hurricane wasteland in my Armiger Thunder IV scouting truck, on my way to retrieve a tree harvester.

RoadCraft is by the creators of Spintires, SnowRunner and MudRunner. Like those games, it's about navigating large vehicles through inhospitable landscapes, but the focus here has shifted to performing clean up duties in the wake of environmental cataclysms. It requires a lot of patience, or to put it in a more positive light, a receptiveness to the particular fantasy it's trying to simulate. In this way, it feels even more niche than SnowRunner, which saw the series receive some inexplicable—albeit well-deserved!—crossover success.

RoadCraft is more niche because everything I do in it feels laborious, painstaking, and finicky. I need to surrender to its slowly-but-surely approach. That's no criticism: it feels laborious, painstaking and finicky in ways that, I guess, capture something true about the practice of driving massive vehicles across inhospitable terrain.

It takes me about five minutes to travel the 500 metres to the tree harvester, if I'm not counting the several respawns I need to trigger due to 1) driving my truck straight into a dip full of flood water and 2) getting stuck between two trees that I carelessly thought I could just knock over. Once I've reached the harvester I transfer to its cockpit and start the next part of my mission, which is to clear an area of pesky trees. I get there as quickly as I can, which is quite slowly, and start grabbing trees with the claws of the harvester and processing them, which involves stripping leaves and smaller branches from the main trunk. It's all about manoeuvring this beastly machine into the right position, and then moving its arm into the right position, and hopefully never getting stuck in the process.

Before I go on I should admit that I'm a thoroughly impractical person. It takes me much longer to learn common sense things than it does most other people I know. Where vehicles are concerned, I didn't get my driver license until well into my adulthood. I avoid reverse parking whenever I can, so much so that I'll park whole blocks away from my destination rather than attempt it, especially if anyone's around to watch. I would never drive with a trailer attached: I'd kill someone.

With all this in mind, I was proud that it didn't take me very long to clear this area of trees in my tree harvester: only around five minutes or so. Maybe I'm not such an idiot after all. But things get much harder after that. I need to warp into my log forwarder—basically a truck that you can load long logs onto—pick up all the logs from the trees I've cleared, and then travel about 500 metres away to drop them off at a sawmill. This is a terrifying prospect to me.

I'm right to feel nervous because it takes me a very long time to load three logs into my log forwarder. Maneuvering the claw at the end of the crane just so, in order for it to pick up a log without the log landing in my tray all askew, thus preventing me from tying it down, all the better to cart it safely 500 metres through rugged terrain, is akin to the futile physics buffoonery of a Bennet Foddy game. Except this is real, or at least, simulating a reality. It is ever so tough for me to load three logs onto my log forwarder, but I respect that RoadCraft makes me do everything short of manually tying the logs down myself. When I wasn't driving myself mad with the crane and claw, I couldn't help but to admire the granularity of its physics. Logs did exactly what I expected logs to do. I was able to twist the crane arm into weird positions that actually started to hoist the cabin into the air (on purpose, of course).

Later I have to tidy up the area surrounding a concrete plant, which is harried by regular blinding dust storms. First I have to go and move a bunch of stuff out of the way using two varieties of crane. I like this job because it's straightforward and doesn't involve laying logs on a trailer. I get in there, connect my crane to crates, barrels and other rubbish, and move the stuff outside the designated clean up area. Sometimes instead of using the crane, I just smash into stuff with the grill of my truck until it hurtles off into the dusty distance. I do this especially when a duststorm arrives, blanketing the whole map in an opaque orange shroud that basically forces me to pause for a moment if I want to work with any precision.

Once I move all this crap out of the way with my crane, things get interesting and far less manual. I have to restore a path to the Concrete Plant, which seems fine, except the tutorial pop-up warns that I'll first need to pour the sand with a dump truck, then flatten the sand with a dozer, then lay raw asphalt with an asphalt paver, and then roll down the raw asphalt with a roller. After the log situation, the thought of doing all of this makes me want to drown in mud.

But I can actually do this from a birds-eye point of view and in a semi-automated fashion. All I need to do is click on my dump truck (which already has sand, though if it didn't, I'd need to visit a nearby sand quarry) and instruct it what to do.

I can watch from above, or follow its work using the normal third-person camera, or just go and do something else. I didn't realise it at first, but RoadCraft has automation systems that bring it closer to something like a management sim. I guess it is pretty unrealistic that only one guy would be doing all this post-disaster infrastructure fixing.

The management aspects then take on something akin to Factorio, albeit in a simplified sense. Once I've built my road I need to plot out a sensible route that all of my automated vehicles can henceforth travel along between my base and a distant concrete slabs facility. I can make these routes as elaborate as I want, so long as any potential obstacles have been removed, not to mention that I haven't left any heavy machinery parked along the route, resulting in stuff like this happening:

This creates a fun process of plotting out expedient paths that may not necessarily follow the remains of the pre-disaster infrastructure. Factoring into this: I can also build bridges wherever I want, which reminds me a little bit of Death Stranding. Depending on the type of bridge, I need certain types of material to complete it. These can be placed anywhere – even where bridges aren't necessary. I anticipate some pretty bizarre engineering solutions to emerge among RoadCraft's presumed audience.

Like the older games in this series, I respect what RoadCraft is aiming for, and I love that it requires me to take a slow, almost meditative approach. In some ways it's a physics puzzler wrapped in a lavish simulator outfit. When I started to think about it like this, I started to enjoy it more. I lost several hours of an evening, replaying the first mission, gathering not just the three logs but several more, all the better to build superfluous bridges. The route plotting aspect is also something this once-Transport Tycoon fanatic will probably dump a bunch of time in, once RoadCraft launches on May 20.