DESPITE what the title may suggest, Convoy – developed by Convoy Games and Triangle Studios – isn’t a game about a novelty song from the 1970s featuring a lot of CB Radio slang.
The plot is that your spaceship has suffered some sort of malfunction and come down hard on a planet that’s a very much like Pandora from Borderlands, the setting from Rage, or anywhere else a Mad Max movie could conceivably set.
The game was originally released in 2015 on PC and has now been released on Nintendo Switch – a natural fit for the game’s pixel art aesthetic – as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. I reviewed the Switch version.
Convoy is billed as “a tactical Roguelike” (I’m not sure why; it doesn’t seem to have much in common with dungeon-crawlers which typify the genre) and the setting and plot – essentially protecting an armoured big rig from raiders – was appealing, but the actual gameplay was lacklustre and the whole experience ended up being “OK but not great” for me.
The controls, which just didn’t fit the muscle memory I’ve developed from years of using consoles, were a source of frustration for me and I had several battles lost because I’d press the wrong button and either not do thing I needed to, or do something I didn’t want to do.
It’s also quite difficult and not particularly forgiving, even the “easy” difficulty, not helped by some gameplay issues.
Your drivers are more clueless than even the most hopeless L-plater out there; not getting out of the way of obstacles, not firing at things unless you specifically tell them to, and generally being a pain the exhaust pipe to manage.
For some inexplicable reason, your main big rig has no weapons of its own, so on a number of occasions I found all my escort vehicles destroyed and had to simply watch as my main vehicle was whittled down by raider attacks, powerless to do anything effective to stop them.
It’s not a complicated game and I can see why it would have its fans, but despite the premise and entertaining writing and setting it just didn’t get my engine going.
It works well as a Switch game and it’s certainly entertaining enough in short bursts but it’s not something I can see myself getting seriously invested in.
