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Sunday, December 3, 2023 3:00:56 PM

Overland Review (YeGoblynQueenne)

tl;dr fun for a while, not very challenging and not very replayable.
Some reviews say this game is too hard. That's not right, On "normal" t's probably the easiest resource management game I've ever played.
You have a grand total of two resources to manage (although it looks like there's more): one is time, measured in actions and the other is space, measured in item slots. Characters take actions and have items slots, so you want to maximise the number of characters in your group / party.
Characters are transported in vehicles and vehicles have limited seats for characters (plus extra item slots, the different kinds of vehicle trading off seats for slots) so the first thing to do is to find the vehicle with the most seats. That's the van, with five seats. Five seats means five characters, times 3 actions each (2 on hard) makes for 15 actions per turn. That's more than you'll need on most maps. Each character can carry up to two items plus one equipped item, so five characters is 10 items, and that's the most you can carry if you choose any other vehicle (which may have more item slots but also fewer seats for characters, and therefore, fewer item slots from characters- and fewer actions also). The van doesn't have any storage but you can attach a luggage rack to it that will give you 2 extra slots for 12 in total. At that point the difficulty is in deciding which items to drop to leave some empty item slots so your characters can carry fuel to fill up the vehicle, which they have to do often.
The other choices you make follow from all that. You need to keep your fuel tank topped up (if you can find a jerry can, that increases the amount you can carry) and make sure to stop at the icons that show a human where you can pick up more survivors. Characters have special skills but you don't see what they are (the game only gives vague descriptions) and they don't seem to make a huge difference anyway, so after you have filled in all five of your van seats you can ignore the locations with more characters and focus on those that give you fuel, equipment, trades, and meds.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don't earn any points for killing monsters. Monsters are attracted to noise and some ways to kill a monster make noise so it's better to work around them instead of through them. The game doesn't make that clear, but the monsters will not attack your vehicle and cannot attack your characters through it. You can turn on the vehicle and move around (in a limited area, where there is road, unless you have an offroad truck) so you can position it so as to screen your characters while they're searching bins and siphoning fuel from cars etc. You can also run over some monsters with a vehicle for free (others damage your vehicle and it may even explode).
... and that's it really. I just finished a game with five characters (including a dog, Carwash) without losing any characters and I only needed to revive one because I was, what the hell, let's see what happens (I just restarted the level to avoid the hassle of reaching the character to revive him). With five characters in a van I ended up leaving most of the team in the van most of the time because there was nothing for them to do. The game got so easy that I didn't realise that the dog could howl and stun at least some of the monsters for a turn.
Honestly, this is not Nethack and it's really not hard at all once you figure out the essentials.
On the other hand- the downside is the ending is underwhelming, to say the least, and the game gets so easy after a while that it doesn't have a lot of replayability despite the procedurally generated levels and characters. To be honest, I only got it on sale and I wouldn't have bought it at full price, but it was a fun few hours of play.