Caravan PC Review

It’s not easy being an Arabian prince. Especially when one day everything’s royally good and the next one everything you own turns into a ruin because of something your father did. It kind of spoils the mood. It also makes you set off into the desert with your caravan, engaging in trading, survival and combat. However, just like the desert sun wears down your character on long journeys, so does Caravan wear down your patience the longer you play it.

Caravan starts off easily, introducing you to its mechanics via a tutorial that explains things in a decent enough fashion. Not long after, you’ll find yourself travelling between cities in order to trade, while fulfilling the act objective the game throws at you. The engine behind all you do will be trading, which is done in a clean, easy-to-understand interface. The fact that you can have the tutorial pop up at any time also helps. The in-game map gives you information on how goods are priced in all of the places you can visit, save for when the merchants change stocks while you’re on the road. Buying things cheap to sell them for more at different merchants is, thus, something you’ll be doing often.

After you set off, while your caravan’s marker moves on the world map, you’ll sometimes stop, due to events popping up. These can range from meeting people that want to trade, encountering lone animals to passing by a graveyard which you can rob, a cave which you can explore and so on. This could have easily been reason enough to get through the constant click fest that exchanging goods ultimately ends up being; however, it didn’t quite turn out that way. The first few times you encounter each of these different events there’s, naturally, a sense of discovery that will fuel you on. However, by the fourth or fifth encounter, you’ll have already seen all possible outcomes. As an example caves can give you nothing, give you goods/items or contain ghouls which will automatically initiate combat. This becomes more and more tedious as you realize you will be going back through the same places quite a lot.

As the story progresses, a trickle of new events will be introduced, however, they do not save the player from tedium. This is mainly due to the fact that the novelty, again, disappears after the fifth time you encounter them. Besides that, the context doesn’t help them either. One of the events includes an encounter with a trader that has a chance to be an outlaw that will threaten to kill you unless you pay him. You can either give him money, or a person in your caravan or, as a last resort, choose to fight him. Thing is, you can also not pay attention to him when he calls you over and all will be fine and dandy. Once you know which events have the smallest risk, you’ll constantly pick those while ignoring the others. The writing is also not very engaging. In my travels, I’ve encountered people that were sick or in chains. I tried saving them the first couple of times only to realize that regardless of what happens to them, I never genuinely cared for anyone else but myself. The same can be said about party members and story characters. The only motivation for you to even pay attention to these events is tied to the character experience and drachmas they reward. This is a large blow for the game’s immersion factor.

Alongside your character, you can take with you animals which give more space, auxiliaries which offer speed and party members which come in a number of classes. In Caravan, characters have six traits: three that pertain to combat, three that pertain to haggling. Different classes will have different stats and skills. These skills can affect a variety of things from movement speed, to water consumption to base stats during combat and haggling. In this respect, Caravan gets at least the basic elements down. You’ll want to manage your party so as to cover your back in tougher fights, or get a better chance at haggling for better prices. Perhaps you also want a Sage to heal you after fights. Every party member and animal increases the water requirement for travelling. Water, then, occupies space in your inventory, so, you always need to think about what you can and cannot get with the drachmas you have at your disposal at a given time.

Combat and haggling are affected by different stats but done in exactly the same manner, namely, a combination of rock-paper-scissors and dice. Every stat of yours counters a stat of your rival’s. So, you’re pitting your base values against their base values. These values can be increased using dice. Six dice are given every round, all with random values and you each take turns. The problem here comes from the fact that on many occasions, AI rivals kept picking the lowest dice on the board, when clearly the move made no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, the game does sometimes pit you against opponents that are a couple of levels above you. If something happened to your fighter (and there are things that can happen to them), you can end up dying solely due to the enemy having much higher base values. When these fights are scripted to happen due to certain main story elements, this can easily lead to having to restart the game altogether, as the save system is based on your last checkpoint, which is always the moment you arrive in the previous town.

This is, indeed, a time when games that involve you dying a lot are common. When such an event got the best of me, it was my mistake due to ignoring my party composition.  At the same time, there is no way to really predict when these scripted events come by.  So, really, there’s lots of moments when you end up feeling like the AI is letting you win as well as others when fights are simply unfair. All of that could be overlooked if restarting a game didn’t involve going through the exact same story, with the exact same cities and exact same events you’re already tired of. The fact that the writing is dull and simple does not help getting through the game either. So, by the time you reach the third act, chances are you’ll feel like you keep doing the same thing over and over with the reward not being worth the hassle.

Caravan’s graphical style may look simple; however, it fits the game well enough. The monochrome tendency is, perhaps, justified by the setting. Every now and then you get a nice oasis in the distance, or a sunset which you do notice. One could argue that the cities look simple and similar. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong, as there’s not a lot of identity going into the smaller locations. For the most part cities end up feeling like simple checklists that have you refilling water, trading, quests and upgrading characters. It would have been neat to rest a while and learn things about each stop, especially if the writing felt like less of a telegraphed version of a bigger story. On the musical side, Caravan’s soundtrack stays in the background adding just enough to the atmosphere.

Caravan may be enjoyed by those with resistance to high amounts of repetition and who are seeking a casual, slow-paced trek through the Arabian Peninsula. I’ve encountered no bugs in my playthrough and the story is pretty lengthy, too. Others, however, may not be enchanted by the title’s repetitive events, clunky AI and thin story. At the end of the day, Caravan comes out as a game that, while functional, fails to be compelling in any way.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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