Roadcraft review - one of this year's best games, easily better than Snowrunner

It almost feels like a risk to be so enthusiastic and so openly impressed with Roadcraft. This is a game about trucks and steamrollers, designed in such a way that, if you commit to playing it, it will require you to spend dozens of real hours pretending to build virtual roads. If somebody who doesn't know about or especially care for videogames looks at Grand Theft Auto or Doom, it's nevertheless likely that the appeal of those games makes an immediate kind of sense – you can tell why somebody would enjoy those. If you're comfortably ionate about Roadcraft, and why its abstraction of driving heavy-goods vehicles and using them to construct bridges and other infrastructure is so meaningful, so enjoyable, people might think that you're either joking, embellishing, or in the grip of a fixation. Nevertheless, Roadcraft is one of the best games of this year.

The significance of our actions in videogames is typically measured in lives, deaths, and epochs – you're saving the world, you're deg a civilization, you're responsible, somehow, for the fate of the whole universe. In survival game.

Crafting, as a videogame experience, is often superficial – a crafting game is usually actually a collecting game, and the goal is to simply find items and then 'put them together' via a couple of button presses. Roadcraft turns that dynamic around. Building materials and vehicles – the items – are readily and easily available. Instead of testing your ability to find things, and your patience for the search, it challenges you to get better at using those resources.

To build a road, for example, you need to use a dump truck to pour the sand, the blade of a bulldozer to level the sand out, a paving machine to spread the asphalt, and then a steamroller to flatten it down. The first time you do it, you'll get uneven grading – you'll tip the dump truck too high, too early, and create a ridge at the start of the road, forming a decline further along. But after road seven, road eight, road nine, the process starts to feel natural, almost meditative. To condense Roadcraft into a single and perhaps trite metaphor, it's the sensational equivalent of kneading dough. It's a crafting game where, rather than finding recipes and getting more stuff, you actually become better at the craft.

Of course, it's a difficult pitch: how can a videogame where you spend your time slowly transporting consignments of mortar possibly be satisfying, in the sense that we're accustomed to the idea of satisfaction in videogames? There's a hack article to be written about Roadcraft as the anti power fantasy, and how it encourages you to be considerate, and slow, and humble. But the sense of reward that Roadcraft creates is large, because it's tangible.

The overwhelming majority of videogames are rooted in fantasy, and so the victories you achieve and the change you affect can only resonate so far. The premise of Roadcraft – you're part of a construction company, helping to rebuild often impoverished communities in the wake of natural disasters – creates the foundation for a more profound feeling of accomplishment. And then the fact that everything takes a long time, and even the most trivial interactions require an element of learning, and that when you're finished all of this, you can actually look at something you've made and understand its purpose, makes what you do in the game feel worthwhile.

There's a paradox in the concept of 'realism' in videogames, whereby the more a game tries to provide a sense of realism, the more unreal it becomes. The thirst, hunger, and tiredness mechanics in survival games are a useful example. Superficially, yes, it is more 'realistic' that your character gets thirsty, hungry, and tired. But the way that you feed, water, and rest them, by opening an interface, selecting an item, selecting 'use,' and refilling an on-screen meter, feels unreal, or uncanny.

Roadcraft is a 'realistic' game in the sense that the vehicles are all fastidiously modeled on their actual counterparts and there is a physics engine which impersonates the real-world effects of weight, friction, and speed. But it's also videogamic – for the sake of the overall experience, and effectuating and enhancing the core challenges and joys, Roadcraft is comfortable with conventional gameisms.

Yes, it wants to synthesize a sense of struggle, but it won't let you get stuck, or get lost. The parts that should feel grounded and weighty – the driving, the building – do feel that way. But videogame conveniences are there when you need them.

It stops Roadcraft from being frustrating. It also staves off any self-defeating nonrealism. There's no attempt here to make you forget that you're playing a videogame, or apply the language of videogames to subject matter for which it isn't suited. Everything feels natural; Saber makes spreading asphalt with a slow-moving paving machine just as playable as an Infinity Ward gunfight.

On the contrary, the menu has a few too many tabs, and you will occasionally need to read an objective two or three times before fully comprehending which tasks need to be done in what order. The U-controlled fleets of trucks you dispatch along the roads you've built will sometimes become inexplicably stuck or crash into one another, owing to a couple of imperfect pathing behaviors. But those complaints are negligible, and perfect targets for the first few post-release patches.

The off-road driving systems of Mudrunner and building games on PC. If the initial Spintires saga felt like it lacked purpose or meaning – like all of your struggle didn't amount to much, and you were completing goals just for the sake of it – Roadcraft's construction mechanics and few narrative conceits create a sense of reward that you won't get from even the most maximalist RPGs and shooters. If there's any consensus about the type of subject matter that makes for a conventionally compelling videogame versus material that should be consigned to simulators, only to be enjoyed by eccentrics, obsessives, and contrarians, Roadcraft suggests that a consistent and clear vision is enough to make anything work.