Convoy

 PC
User Score
5.5

Mixed or average reviews- based on 33 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 33
  2. Mixed: 10 out of 33
  3. Negative: 13 out of 33

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  1. Thirdrail
    May 3, 2015
    4
    I have trouble believing that any of the professional critics who reviewed this game played it for very long. Superficially, it's a cool little Mad Max game, built along similar lines to FTL. Once you've spent a couple of hours with it, the game dies under the weight of a wildly under sophisticated combat engine. Your main truck is just a fixture in the center of a highway that neverI have trouble believing that any of the professional critics who reviewed this game played it for very long. Superficially, it's a cool little Mad Max game, built along similar lines to FTL. Once you've spent a couple of hours with it, the game dies under the weight of a wildly under sophisticated combat engine. Your main truck is just a fixture in the center of a highway that never curves or changes. Support vehicles can move around as satellites on a very basic grid. It's an auto combat game with no driving or maneuvering, only positioning within the confines of a hundred foot section of a seven lane road. As a result, the only thing you really do is choose which incoming vehicle to focus fire on, using a "variety" of weapons that don't actually do anything interesting enough to feel different. Sometimes a bad game can a good fit for a certain group of people, but, in this case, I'm not sure I could tell you who that group would be. People who find comfort in extreme repetition, perhaps. (Side note here for the tabletop people: If, like me, you are one of the Car Wars people... just move along. There is nothing to see here. You could buy five Hot Wheels and two six sided dice and come up with a far more entertaining game in 20 minutes.) I barely noticed myself playing 400 hours of FTL when it launched. I could not have made it to 4 hours with Convoy if you'd put a gun to my head. Profoundly disappointing.… Expand
  2. lolmaus
    Jul 18, 2015
    3
    Just placing my vote.

    For an accurate reflection of my impression from the game, please read the Thirdrail's review.

    In short, this game is primitive, lame, boring, has no tactics, no diversity.
  3. planetfall
    Dec 21, 2018
    3
    I like FTL a fair bit, and I definitely see the inspiration Convoy took from that game, but that's not enough to save it. A lot of its problems relate to doing similar things as FTL in certain ways without compensating for the differences in gameplay.

    For instance, in FTL you can only reliably regain health at shops, though you can be healed by certain events and equipment. A lot of the    I like FTL a fair bit, and I definitely see the inspiration Convoy took from that game, but that's not enough to save it. A lot of its problems relate to doing similar things as FTL in certain ways without compensating for the differences in gameplay.

    For instance, in FTL you can only reliably regain health at shops, though you can be healed by certain events and equipment. A lot of the higher-level play, therefore, centers around avoiding ever taking damage.
    In Convoy you can, far as I can tell, only EVER regain health at shops (never found an event that healed me, and the repair drones are laughably ineffective) but the combat system is completely different and you're effectively guaranteed to take damage. So in reality it's a crapshoot based on how many random battles you run into. Theoretically if you have terrible luck you could run into a battle whenever you moved a pixel on the map! There's not much tactical depth either. So there isn't much you can do to avoid damage except "focus down enemy, repeat", and your main way to end fights faster - ramming enemies so they run into an instant death wall - makes you *take extra damage*. You can get activated abilities for your main vehicle but they still just contribute to being ways to focus down enemies faster. There's almost never a time that I could see when you wouldn't want to use the ability the instant it comes off cooldown rather than waiting for a better time to use it. The only exception I noted was an AoE missile where you might want to take an extra second or two to move your own vehicles out of the blast radius.

    You can run out of fuel, but that just means you instantly get an event or combat where you can get more fuel. The only downside is that you maybe get less scrap than normal battles. The event text implies you've been waiting around for a while, but I'm pretty sure nothing changes. You definitely don't have FTL's giant wall of death bearing down on you and making sure you never, ever want to run out of fuel. And anyway you can buy an unlimited amount of fuel and it's very cheap and you get more from normal battles, so it feels like they just put it in because "you have to have a fuel mechanic."

    Graphics are bad. I'm no graphics snob but this is pretty bad pixel art. There are something like 3-4 music tracks in the game and they get annoying fast.

    The lack of tactical depth is matched with a lack of strategic depth. There are different types of weapons but the differences are so small that you'll tend to want whichever weapon has the biggest number. There's "replay" ""value"" in that there are a bunch of unlockable starting vehicles, but as far as I can tell they're all the same thing with different numbers so who cares.

    The world isn't super interesting. The description on steam/gog implies you can influence which faction gains power but they're all evil so who cares. Events aren't too varied. The game is full of references to other media and while I'm normally okay with that sort of thing in moderation... it isn't in moderation, and it commits the cardinal sin of "it's blatantly obvious that this is referencing something, but I don't know what" way too often. The game leans too hard on references and this gives it the vibe of not having creativity of its own. At other times the writing is... just really bad, so bad that I can't tell if it's trying to make fun of bad game writing or just IS bad game writing.

    3/10 because it's OK for a few hours of mindless fun, because the combat system does have a handful of good ideas. It's just that those ideas weren't realized to anywhere near their full potential, and the battles mesh with the rest of the game about as well as those infuriating three gear graphics we've all seen.    … Expand
  4. SereFracta
    Apr 3, 2019
    3
    I'm a Mad Max and FTL fan, so that puts me neatly in the target for Convoy. Unfortunately, the setting is about it's only attractive ingredient. The strategic and tactical elements are feeble and strangled by luck, and the writing leans too heavily on clichés and pop culture references. Avoid.

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
72

Mixed or average reviews - based on 17 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 17
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 17
  3. Negative: 1 out of 17
  1. SpazioGames
    Oct 28, 2015
    80
    A sort of spiritual successor to FTL, Convoy is as fun as is sadistic, and will torture you with its challenges while keeping you interested and amused. The clear inspiration from Mad Max is only another virtue.
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  2. Pelit (Finland)
    Sep 1, 2015
    90
    An interesting roguelike RPG in a madmaxey sci-fiworld. The tactical car combat is fluid and addictive. Pretty much everything is a sci-fi reference, which can be a burden. [Aug 2015]
  3. Games.cz
    Aug 11, 2015
    70
    Convoy had ambitions, that were not fulfilled by its narration nor by the game world elaboration, but the FTL-style gameplay is adapted perfectly.
    Read full review
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