It's not every day you see a post-apocalyptic vehicular combat game on Steam. Since Alex & Vinny haven't QuickLooked it yet, I decided to give it a try.

Its closest comparison is FTL: you travel around a map, investigating random encounters, finding parts to fix your crashed spaceship, looting and buying fuel and weapons, and getting into fights while driving 60mph through the wastelands. The meat of the game is the vehicular combat: your cars maneuver for position on a moving battlefield where incoming hazards can be as dangerous as the enemies. Here's the aspects of Convoy's combat that I found interesting:

• Your MVC is the center of your convey: if it's destroyed, game over. It can't maneuver and stays in the middle of the road, but all of your manually-activated powers, like EMP bursts and mine launchers, are equipped on it.
• Vehicles have both HP and Armor. Vehicles are destroyed if they reach 0 HP, but their Armor reduces their damage taken by a %. Some weapons can reduce their target's armor, too.
• Vehicles need to be within range and have clear line of sight to fire at their targets. Protecting your MVC with your other vehicles is a valid tactic.
• Your vehicles can ram enemy vehicles to push them around, causing damage to both vehicles. You can use this to shove them into an incoming building for an instakill. It is immensely satisfying to remove the toughest enemy car by slamming it into a canyon wall.

As I played the game, my positioning became more important. Enemy cars would often focus most of their fire on my MVC unless my other cars blocking it. My big tanky car would act as a vehicular shield, using its heavy plasma gun to rip apart the enemies' armor, while my tiny motorbikish car would circle around the edges, finishing off unarmored cars with its minigun. Meanwhile, my pickup truck would just plow into the midst of them, using a force field and chainsaw to cause massive ramming damage without being injured itself. (The force field negates all damage to the vehicle from ramming, while the chainsaw increases damage done via ramming.) Unfortunately, I lost that game when one of my escorts blew up in a random event. Unfortunately, I had already bought all of the spare cars for sale at the various camps, so I had to try finishing the game with only 3 escorts instead of 4. The lack of extra firepower marked my end when I faced a string of combats to reach the Raider boss.

I've already started my 3rd run, but I may have to restart it. Every time I try to load up that save, it gets stuck on a black screen. I also noticed a previous bug where clicking one of the choices in a dialogue option didn't work; I ended up turning down a quest because the game refused to let me accept it. A bit of browsing on the game's Community Hub brought up other bugs: between that and the ramping difficulty as you collect ship parts (which means some of the tasks to earn them can become nigh-impossible if you do them last), it feels like a rough game that needs a couple more patches to be really polished. Still, this is a spiritual successor to FTL that has enough differences to make it stand out. I doubt it'll have the same legs as FTL did, and $15 might be asking for too much, but I currently feel this game is worth at least $10 just for giving me a decent post-apocalyptic vehicular strategy game. You can check it out on Steam here.

Love this game so far. It has all the components of several games and themes I enjoy. The gameplay and real time combat is very deep and it has alot of MCV and vehicles to unlock. Once I unlocked James Hayes(I think thats his name) MVC with the built in rocket launchers It made smaller teams of vehicles with heavily upgraded health and armor more viable. Fortunately I have not encountered the black screen glitch you've found. Once thing I found weird was the music did not seem to fit the game. Honestly it sounds like it was ripped from FTL.

Looks cool, might have to pick this one up on a sale sometime in the future. Good blog

Really liking this game so far. Has the same addictive quality as FTL. People's complaints about upcoming threats that can knock out vehicles is easily mitigated by the pause system. You always have at least 10+ seconds to react. And it's great to be able to turn the tables on powerful enemies to knock them out in battles using the same system of obstacles.

I really do like that game. On my low-end laptop, it does take a bit of a hit, but apart from that I find it's tactical combat very immersive. The gear is a bit shallow (the guns only get better; there is not trade-off for a larger weapon) but I love the look of some of the cars, especially Andy's Keeper Drones. All in all, I thought it was pretty good. From what I have experienced, the devs were very quick in getting the bugs as patched as they could during launch. Hopefully that game is successful for the devs; I would love some expansion content.