There's promise here but twenty hours in I was left with an ugh feeling. The game makes a show about having a lot of different avenues to explore, but as is typical of the sandboxy genre, a large majority of them are not worth your time. Do you want play a 15 second minigame to get 3-5 of one type or another inland shellfish, or a hunting game to get 3-5 of some kind of animal when food is cheap and abundant and you can quickly amass a ridiculous cash surplus just from doing basic delivery jobs?

Money stops being an object very quickly no matter what you do, unblocking research is a fun little puzzle, gearing up your truck is fun. But the the only blocker to further progress is additional "cores". You get a trickle of them from quests or exploration or what have you, but those dry up fairly fast, and what you're left is trying to scrounge up components from ruins and building them yourself.

Ruins are near guaranteed to be combat encounters, and, again, it's pretty fun to set up your truck to be able to take these. But once you have done so, the combat encounters become trivial. Instead, you become gated by the auto-stress that bigger gangs of infected auto-inflict on your people, even if you mow their swarms down in five clicks. So you drive over to a location and exhaust it of everything it has, and then have to high-tail right of there not because things are actually dangerous but because your loopy crew wants to wreck their own truck and their own faces. And even if the stress nonsense didn't exist, you'd still be stuck playing a game where you only actually care about three different resources of the bajillion displayed, and the only consistent-ish way to get them is annoying and tedious.

Until you reach that point in the game, however, the game is a lot of fun. Exploring the space is fun, you need to pay attention to the landscape and your options to not get killed off by your own bad decisions, and the sense of atmosphere (some clashing between character portraits and the rest of the game aside) of driving a big rig through a zombie post-apocalypse is on point. Sandbox games always break down into some tedious gonzo grind by the end, so I'm not holding it against the developers it happened - just wish it happened later than it did.

Happy having spent my money on it.

- Buy low, sell high.

- The world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, reminiscent of "Fallout" 1 and 2.

- Main and side quest RPG.

- The writing and random encounters are entertaining. A tonne of crafting ( the truck alone has 10 upgrade slots ) - there's a catalogue of weapons and clothing. Deeper into the game, there's even a wagon / trailer that can be added.

- Cooking is interesting ( you figure out cooking recipes by experimenting with different ingredients ).

- Characters have stats and random traits ( some quirky - not everyone is compatible. It takes a bit of work and experimentation, to form a cohesive team ).

- There are four seasons ( dust storms, rain and snowstorms ). There are terrain modifiers, which will slow the truck down, such as swampland.

- Your truck has encumberance ( which affects drive speed ), overheating and underheating, and the cabin has comfort levels.

- There looks to be multiple maps. The developers spent a lot of time play testing and balancing the game.

- The game is still in development because there are "road builder buildings" where the description reads "coming soon" ( I'm guessing that you might be able to build special roads between cities, like in the game "Civilisation".

- There's definitely a "one-more-turn" addiction for roughly 30 hours, but once I almost fully kitted out four people with basic shotguns, very little can really touch me in combat ( I would have to really badly mess up my game ) so combat went from being scary and intimidating to being a *shrug* whatever event. I find myself questioning whether I need to further upgrade my truck and team's gear, so I started getting bored, and switched from deliveries to trying to speedrun the main questline.

- The cheap $10 CDN price is a steal.

- I'll write more once I finish the game, if I feel the need.

Date: 7/18/2024
Unbelievably excited about this one. Seconding the one other person I saw saying it's like a Caravaneer 3 - Dustland Delivery is truly the spiritual successor I have been waiting for for years. Nevertheless, it's been in early access for all of a week so far, so the hope as always is that there's more to come and more to fix. As it currently is, here are my thoughts.

Pros:
- Like I said, it's hitting all the nostalgia points for me. Resource management/exploration is a formula that is hard to get wrong.
- Characters have detailed traits: stats, a relatively diverse list of personality attributes, titles, appearances, and the other basics. A lot of fun for players like me that enjoy customization and making little casts of characters; makes playthroughs feel more unique. Oh, and gay people are real in this world (and you can be too), unlike some games like this I've played.
- The profit scaling by supply-demand feels logical but not too punishing.
- Just a ton of little details everywhere. The side quests have nice atmosphere, if that makes sense, and I couldn't help but think "Agh, but now I want to know what would've happened if I did the other thing!" on a bunch of them. Left with more questions, in a good way.

Cons:
- The UI is messy, or at least, it feels messy. My opinion is that it's like that because it's barely explained, so there's a lot of guesswork in the beginning as to what I'm supposed to be doing with the dozens of buttons and info fields.
- Tutorial is weak. It teaches only the bare basics, the "idea" of what to do, but in practice there's a lot of guessing as to the "what else?"

[generally unimportant, more so notes to the devs] Here's some nitpicks, not in that I care too much but because I think they can be improved on: I don't actually mind the "anime" character portraits as some have described them as, but their art quality varies in an off-putting way as some are very good looking where others look significantly technically worse. The visual uniformity is ever so slightly off due to some assets being noticeably higher resolution than others and selective use of anti-aliasing vs. pixel sprites. Some of the audio mixing is unbalanced and I noticed this mostly in the sound for upgrading things, because it was blaringly loud. There hotkeys are unclear and I could not find documentation of them (opinion: I would expect ESC to open the settings window and it does not.) The save file opening screen has the load save and delete buttons a little close together for comfort, and the confirmation windows look identical for both - I can see someone deleting their save on accident quite easily. And heads up, the window name is still WastelandExpress after opening the game.
Looking forward to revisiting all of this in the future already.