TLDR: The game has many nice things to offer, but the big picture is missing. So in principle, Convoy is pretty much like FTL, just not in space. You travel around with your spacesh... erm, convoy, which you steadily improve in random encounters and shops. You get money from making decisions in special events and fighting enemies in random encounters. Factions, shops and events are randomly placed in every new game. The differences hide in the details: you don't have a single ship with subsystems, but instead a convoy with vehicles. Ultimately, it boils down to the same mechanics, however. Sadly, while the game takes a different approach to many issues, it shares the same underlying problem: whether you win or lose is only up to the random number generator. In fact, many things the game does better just hurt so much more due to randomness. For example, the game lets you freely explore its map at any time. There is no advancing wall of doom driving you forward. However, this completely removes proper progression. There are no later levels with shops that sell better stuff, everything you can buy is randomized *once* at game start. Whether you are lucky to hit the about 10 shops in a sequence that is useful is then completely up to chance. In fact, whether there is such a sequence is completely up to chance. The worst problem however is that there is hardly any progress in the meta-game. This ultimately make replaying the game feel extremely pointless. In FTL, you could unlock radically different ships. Here, you just unlock a bunch different light vehicles, whose only purpose is to get scraped later on for heavier vehicles. But whether these are available or you just get stranded in the desert with no fuel is only decided by the random number generator...
