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Sabre Interactive have produced a number of games over the years that cater to a specific genre, namely the dads who never got the chance to be rugged outdoor tradesmen. The dads stuck at their desks, the majority of dads out there.

Now their latest offering, Roadcraft, aims to tie together all the previous games and give dads out there another sandbox to scratch the itch of wearing flannel shirts and driving heavy machinery.

Roadcraft is a little different from previous offerings. Mudrunner and the Classic Snowrunner both had you delivering supplies to a disaster-hit town, with either mud or snow and ice to keep you on your toes.

As someone who sank countless satisfying hours into Snowrunner without much success, a slight tweak of the formula is enough to try a new game.

Expeditions, a Mudrunner game, was too much of a departure from the formula, where the objective was just making it to a point on the map and sometimes surveying. Despite the fun physics and being able to winch your vehicle up mountains, the lack of satisfying objectives and feeling of progress wasn’t there.

Roadcraft seeks to merge the two by having you run your own construction firm in theory, that gets called into areas to prepare them for disasters or to clean up afterwards. It may sound familiar, but there are a few tweaks that make for a different experience.

Firstly, the vehicles no longer take meaningful damage or need refuelling. While this seems like a dumbing down of the previous formula, in practice, you are not in one vehicle long enough to suffer.

The other change stems from this, making loading of cargo more difficult. Previously, you drove your truck into the depot and automatically had the load filled and strapped in for the journey ahead. In Roadcraft, the shock when these ended up on the ground beside the lorry was the first speedbump. 

Instead, you have to get the nearby crane, position it beside the lorry, and stack the three concrete slabs and two iron girders in the correct order before hitting the button to secure the load.

If you manage to do this the first time, then good luck.

Even worse, if you don’t load it properly and set off down the hill in a cavalier manner, the load will tip the lorry, undoing twenty minutes plus of loading it and leaving the materials on the road. It may sound frustrating, but you can only blame yourself.

The other departure from previous games is the infrastructure options. When you make it to other hub points on the map, instead of forcing you to deliver the supplies again, you have to set up a route for AI-driven trucks to transport the materials in real time.

This is all well and good, but these drivers are worse than the worst lorry driver that’s ever tailgated you on a motorway.

If the route is not exactly planned out, they will take joy in driving straight into a tree, gorge, or huge ravine. The route has to be completed once successfully and then will run autonomously for the rest of the level. If you travel on this route, they will even blast their horn at you to get out of the way.

The fun comes when you have to actually build or ‘craft’ the road for the trucks. This isn’t a fast process, as you have to take the truck to the quarry area, where at least the sand is loaded automatically, then dump it before switching to the dozer to flatten the road over the previously muddy area.

Later in the game, simple sand roads are replaced by tarmac and a roller to make them into roads worthy of the name.

The joy in Roadcraft is in the title; you have to craft the roads as if you are plastering a wall. No rushing and no cutting corners, and the nature of the game means it tailors to the time constraints of being a dad.

Only have 30 minutes to spare? No problem, transport a few loads of sand to the road you are building, and you can finish it tomorrow. 

Sabre Interactive has made each of their games distinct enough that you can own them all, depending on what you want from the difficult driving genre.

With Roadcraft, the multiple tools ie vehicles at your disposal, needed to do one task, is the perfect escapism for men stuck behind a desk who may watch Yellowstone and feel a bit more rugged.

If you laugh at that, just remember you aren’t really a Space Marine the next time you load up your favourite shooter.

Roadcraft is available now.