We got our hands dirty in Roadcraft, a new heavy machinery sim from the studio behind Mudrunner

It’s always nice to be reminded of what a broad church the driving game genre is. Saber Interactive’s Mudrunner series shows there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had in driving outside of a racing context, and its upcoming spinoff Roadcraft takes that philosophy up a gear with the introduction of heavy machinery and on-the-fly construction.

Which is where we come in. Idling in a serene patch of wilderness, our 4x4 equipped with a winch, our HUD objectives telling us we need to somehow restore the electricity supply to a nearby concrete factory. Evidently whoever commissioned us for this gig didn’t see how many SUVs we wrote off just trying to get from A to B in previous Mudrunners.

The hook here is the use of heavy machinery. Diggers, mulchers, electrical cable laying vehicles we didn’t even know existed, truth be told. Even in the preview build given to TopGear.com there’s an impressive and faintly daunting variety of them, and a distinct lack of hand-holding about the way they’re handed over to us.

It feels a bit like being on work experience. Each time we have to reverse a tree harvester or nearly topple a crane over with a rash input, we can almost feel a crowd of operators who’d have had this done 50 times over by now watching with their arms crossed behind us, sucking air through their teeth.

But as much as there’s a sting of incompetent shame to much of the core activities on offer here, there’s also a stern, mechanical satisfaction. Watching the landscape change as you exert your will on it – very, very slowly – speaks to some primal bit of the human brain we have from the days when cultivating nature was a survival skill, and thus we still get a dopamine hit from turning natural chaos into something resembling infrastructure.

That’s our best theory as to why we enjoyed laying great lengths of electrical cable in a virtual forest, anyway.

The star of the show here is, as always with Mudrunner-adjacent games, the physics model. Watching the terrain deform under your tyres, seeing trees bend and buckle as you drive over them or attach a winch to them, you can see the complexity of the mathematics underpinning all this messy off-road action.

And while we’ve personally never truly clicked with the way its lumbering vehicles handle, with turning circles as wide as a tectonic plate and a pathological aversion to going faster than 15mph, there is at least a consistency to it. As hard as it is to make progress across the world, let alone repair it, you do feel like you’re battling with the terrain, rather than the game engine.

However when it comes to the finer, fiddlier actions like loading logs onto a trailer using a crane, the vagaries of the camera views do come to the fore. In all fairness there are often a choice of camera angles when operating things like cranes, but they don’t always alleviate the faff.

If you’re in the mood for a more agricultural, slower-paced take on driving and you don’t mind winching yourself out of the odd sinkhole, Roadcraft releases on 20 May on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. In the meantime, there’s a demo due on Steam very soon on 24 February.