Convoy Review

When civilization collapses and we’re all forced to lick the insides of discarded bottle caps for hydration, you can guarantee with reasonable certainty that I won’t last for very long. Not because I’m a scrawny programmer with no survival skills whatsoever, or because I’m a massive coward who’s naturally averse to doing horrible, inhumane things to stay alive, or because I live on a continent where the wildlife is already enough of a threat before the introduction of a super-mutant virus. Those can all be remedied. No, my downfall will be my inability to drive a rusting ute extremely fast while swerving around the wreckage of a destroyed city, which – if post-apocalyptic fiction is to be believed – is the only way to commute in the sun-blasted wastes. Frankly, it just seems irresponsible, especially when all these bloodthirsty future-tribes could just slow down and take shots at one another from the cover of their parked vehicles. I’m sure it’s all terribly exciting in the heat of the moment, but when the fumes and smoke clear and you’re left looking at a dozen wrecked automobiles gently smouldering on the side of a cracked, ruined highway, I refuse to believe that somebody wouldn’t speak up. “Do we maybe want to consider negotiations more thoroughly next time?” says our vexed observer, played by me. “You’d think we’d value cars a bit more highly, what with the buses not running on time any more. Or, you know, ever.”

While we ponder this, let’s consider Convoy, a game that lets you stop and consider, as your last functioning vehicle drifts inexorably towards a lamp-post, the full extent to which you have royally screwed up in life.

The title screen, if nothing else, sure sells us on the concept pretty well: a smoking, sputtering, sparking spaceship, larger than a skyscraper, rather obtrusively parked smack-dab in the post-apocalyptic equivalent of the CBD and clearly in no state to be going anywhere. Without any local equivalent of a Super Cheap Auto in sight, crash-landing on this backwater planet turns out to be even more problematic than first thought, as you must now venture out into the wasteland with your remaining vehicles and see how you might scrounge up the parts to get yourself back into space. Unfortunately, the three equally-nasty factions dominating the ruined surface are sure to make this no simple errand, and with everybody driving around armed to the teeth with the kind of weapons that would get you disqualified from even the most loosely-regulated destruction derby, there’s no way that tour bus and pair of soccer-mum Range Rovers you’ve picked out are going to survive for long unless you strap every last piece of useful equipment you can find to them. Thus begins a cut-throat journey into a world of vehicular homicide, fuel management, desperate scavenging and dialogue trees.

Gameplay-wise you can see Convoy has definitely been looking surreptitiously at FTL’s notes, being neatly split between real-time (pause-able) top-down tactical combat, overworld navigation, and scenarios communicated to you via dry text boxes, but with more than enough originality in it to make it feel like a worthwhile take on the formula. The core experience of constant travel interspersed with random encounters is intact, but instead of lounging in a swivel chair during combat shouting things like “target their weapons!” and “divert power to the engine room!” in an authoritative voice, you are put at the helm of the tour bus – or, to use the ever-so exciting name this game gives it, the Main Convoy Vehicle – on a perpetually horizontally scrolling battlefield, and must direct your support vehicles to protect you from whoever it is that wants to see your head impaled on their hood ornament. Travel, too, is notably different, allowing you to click your way freely around the road map rather than instantaneously warping from place to place, and places an emphasis on carefully weighing up the costs of navigating terrain: sure, you could cut straight across that mesa rather than drive through a city teeming with bloodthirsty raiders, but if you do that then your convoy will gulp its way through fuel like a fat child with a chocolate thickshake.

Still, I’m sure that with the benefit of hindsight we can agree that FTL is not a template without its flaws. Cresting the new wave of roguelikes back in 2012, it was the kind of game that would roll a couple of dice, then try convince you with a mischievous glint in its eye that if you concentrated really hard, furrowed your brow and gritted your teeth until they cracked, you could stop them from landing on snake eyes. Some roguelikes put too much power in the hands of the player, while others put too much in the hands of the random number generator, and FTL was most assuredly the latter. Oh, you could develop better techniques, learn how to handle certain attacks, optimize your routes, but at the end of the day a handful of lucky shots could – and very often did – determine if a run ended in a fiery wreck or a smooth victory. One of my numerous measures of a good roguelike is when sufficient skill can override the whims of the dice, but sadly tactical prowess and bravado were rarely enough to save a bad run. Convoy, fortunately, fares a little bit better. Without the threat of a rebel fleet breathing down your neck, you have a little bit more control over when and where you venture forth, and while I certainly wouldn’t describe it as forgiving – honestly, who wants that anyway? – runs rarely, if ever, go from ‘peachy’ to ‘sniffing bottles for petrol on the side of the road’ with a single unfortunate encounter. You have enough agency in the way you approach things to make the game feel like something you could learn to master, rather than an enormously overcomplicated slot machine, and it’s overall far easier to at least get yourself off the ground provided that you know what you’re doing.

Combat’s an interesting beast too, mind. For all intents and purposes it’s just a grid-based battlefield, but presenting it as a horizontally scrolling environment adds some clever elements that keep things nice and tense. Hazards can scroll in from the right at any time, from electrical pylons to collapsed overpasses, and a failure to keep an eye on the road ahead – especially if you’re too close to the right side of the screen – can mean taking unnecessary damage or even losing vehicles entirely. Conversely, putting self-preservation first and positioning your units too far to the left will almost always mean suffering an endless barrage of mines dropped by the gibbering lunatics who don’t. Well-timed shoves can force opponents to suffer the brunt of their allies’ attacks or even an approaching rock face, but can easily go horribly wrong if you’re off the mark. The environment is a potent weapon, but requires masterful positioning and timing to use well. I can appreciate that.

For the most part, though, you’re reliant on guns, which kind of lack the potential for creativity that characterizes a nice visceral ram. Since enemy units will continue to hammer on your Main Convoy Vehicle right up until they die, the only strategy worth a damn for most of the game is to just get all your vehicles to gang up on one enemy at a time in order of decreasing threat. Sure, playing the schoolyard bully of the wastelands is effective, but after the hundredth battle it starts to feel a little bit routine. Sometimes there’ll be a ruined Blockbuster or something to opportunistically push them into the path of, or you’ll end up overpowered enough to be able to split your resources, but such situations are by far the exception rather than the rule.

Some of the finer points of the combat system feel a bit iffy, too. Contrary to what you might have expected, the marriage of grid-based and real-time strategy elements is not an entirely unhappy one but you can certainly sense the tension at the breakfast table when Mister Real-Time asks for the marmalade. It’s rather like playing a game of chess in which your opponent is free to make a move while you’re still halfway through pushing your rook across the board, or knock over your queen and then claim that it’s actually still occupying a square several inches from where you thought it was. Once a vehicle has started moving from one square to the next, that manoeuvre is effectively set in stone, which feels agonizingly clunky and unresponsive for a game where your orders can easily change several times a second. Occasionally vehicles seem to phase through each other in order to reach their destination, which is just downright bewildering, and often the game’s pathfinding causes good, amicable, level-headed drivers to randomly swerve into bridge supports, because I suppose the safe route was just too much pressure to handle. I’m sure there are rules governing this sort of behaviour, maybe even very simple ones, but the game is happy to let them fall half-obscured behind the sofa where I can only guess at them. Eventually you just learn to micromanage everybody’s movements on what might as well be a frame-by-frame basis, but it’s nothing more than an awkward workaround to a problem that shouldn’t even be there.

Oh Convoy, it’s hard to stay angry at you. For a cut-throat Mad-Max-esque odyssey, the post-apocalyptic wastes are a strangely wondrous place. Rolling the dice on the random-encounter-o-tron more often than not means a battle with a faceless gang of one of the three groups that dominate the landscape – the tribal Raiders, the stereotypically pirate-y Privateers, the ‘we’re not the Borg, honest’ T.O.R.V.A.K – but there are a fair number of encounters to be had with all kinds of colourful characters, only some of which are thinly-veiled references to other stuff. Of course, since Bioware couldn’t quite be persuaded to get on board, we experience all this through the medium of text, but the writing is evocative enough to make such an approach passable. Passable the first time, that is, and something to be hastily clicked through from there onwards. Within minutes of starting the game for the very first time, for instance, I’d stumbled upon a beacon that was a monument to the late Sir Terry Pratchett. “Oh, that’s cute,” said I, heart sufficiently warmed, blissfully unaware that it would turn up in the next run, and the run after that, and the run after that, which rather ruined the magic of the whole thing. This isn’t an isolated case, either: the game is so starved for scenarios that after a couple of hours you’ll have seen nearly all of them, making them less about judging an unpredictable situation and more about fuzzily guessing the odds that the outcome you’re gunning for comes up.

To be honest, lack of variety is kind of a running theme in Convoy, especially when you get to the weapons. In terms of pure numbers the range of weaponry isn’t too bad, but variety is not just variety. A roguelike that produced completely original content on every run would still be a snore-fest if the content didn’t affect how you played at all. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth excels at this, packed with items that – while often utterly game-breaking under the right circumstances – force you to radically alter your playing style to work with them, but Convoy struggles to pull this off. Sure, there are a couple of exotic devices you can mount to your tour bus, including an enormous laser that, upon damaging a group of enemies in a line, brings to mind a magnifying glass poised over a swarm of helpless ants, but most of the doodads you bolt to your units have identical strategies associated with them: move near the guy, then shoot him. Oh, some damage shields, some damage health, some damage armour and some ignore some combination of the three, but you utilise them all in essentially the same capacity and rarely have the luxury of being able to play to their strengths, so why bother making the distinction? It’s the few weapons that encourage you to play differently, encourage you to look at your surroundings in a new light, that keep new runs feeling fresh: the bizarre sci-fi taunting device, the area-of-effect missile launcher, the aforementioned killer magnifying glass or the landmine slingshot. If only they weren’t so few and far between.

Rather appropriately for a game about fighting with cars that are probably held together with duct-tape and trucker spittle, Convoy also feels pretty hacked together at times. Upon first dropping it into my hard drive with a resounding clang, it took about ten consecutive, stubborn, ‘no, this can’t be happening’ launch attempts before the game would even get past the first loading screen without crashing, but even once I finally broke through, things were more than a little shaky. Visual bugs abound, leaving icons and targeting cursors hovering on-screen long after the context they’d be relevant in has disappeared, and text boxes are occasionally so affronted by your shocking course of action that clicking the option you want just causes the game to seize up for a second or so before doing nothing at all. Finishing a fight by ramming an enemy off a bridge causes them to spawn in the same location in the next fight, which is either a head-scratching display of continuity or evidence that Convoy is pretty lax about cleaning up after itself, and in one particularly nasty demonstration of the importance of collision detection, an enemy somehow found their way on top of an obstacle, rendering them invincible to my attacks until they had the good manners to drop down again. Game-breaking? No, not in my experience, but it most certainly could have been. Sometimes the game slows down in battle too, but since you’re pausing the action every three tenths of a second anyway, it’s not really noticeable.

Regardless, Convoy is a prime example of what a joy it is to see games slowly build upon one another. Instead of striking out with a bold, ambitious, but perhaps potentially deeply flawed model, the developers of Convoy looked at FTL and asked themselves the important questions; questions like “what if we had sweet armoured cars with chainsaws strapped to them?”, “what if you could recruit a man driving the hollowed out shell of a mechanical dragon?” and “what if we had a random encounter system that didn’t just completely screw the player over every now and then?” The result isn’t going to blow your mind with its fresh ideas, or the degree to which it was QA tested, but if you’re in the mood for a fresh roguelike where you can lean back and regally conduct battles with a glass of plonk in one hand, this is the one.