02/09/2014

Caravaneer should be considered an All-Times Classic. Even though it is a game from 2006 you should not consider it an old game at all. Many games have been made inspired by it's gameplay and yet none of them have been able to truly portrait the Caravaneer spirit.
As soon as you start the game, you'll find yourself in a desert land where everything is there to kill you. You're a newbie merchant who has been awarded with the opportunity of becoming someone in a
True to the spirit of a desert, you'll find yourself many times wanting to have really been prepared to face it.
You will, however, not be facing only the perils of the desert but also those that humans are! Along the way you will find bandits that are equipped with plenty of weapons and ammo wanting your life or your merchandise and you will have to arm yourself against them as well since your fists won't be enough to save all those shinnies.
Ranging from your fist to rocket launchers, I hardly think you will be short of choices on how to better obliterate those that come after you. Or those that you decide to go after!
Since you might get bored from being a law-abiding citizen, you have the option of hunting those caravans you find along the way or even attack the police or the guards! The good thing is that you will also be able to make a living this way since most of them carry with them huge loads of cash or in goods that you can sell to the cities later.
Since the game has a real economy (which is fucking hard to find if you have tried other games of this genre) you will have to pay attention to the cities need and to what they sell. A good starting point for figuring out how to do this is through the button named "economy" that can be found while you're in the city screens. You will probably not notice it at first, or at all, but you can find how big the city is and the GDP of that particular city. These info hint at the needs of the city.
You will also find out that a city runs out of money as you slowly siphon it of all it's cash and add it to your pocket. This in the long run might mean that you actually have to inject some of that money that you have in your pocket to be able to keep making more money. Because of this, it's always a good idea to have a long route that goes through many cities in order to distribute the money that goes to your pocket to as many cities as possible so they don't run dry.
Even with so many good points, this game is not really worth a 10. A 10 would means that there is nothing to improve, there are only things to be added. You will find a few things that will annoy you as you play it.
One of them is the fact that a couple of the merchandise are just plainly unprofitable to deal in, but at the same time, you have to deal on them. Both Cotton and Crude Oil will make you actually spend money in order to deal on them, and this isn't because you're trying to pump a city with cash, but because one is so cheap (Cotton) that even with a 6x profit margin it is not worth going from one city to the other, and the other one is so heavy (Crude Oil) that to buy and sell it in a reasonable quantity will require you to have not a caravan but a convoy, so full of animals and vehicles that you'll start wondering if you're doing it right. Both of deal will make you spend more money on the supplies than on the merchandise itself.
Aside from those two, there are a few bugs that are not so important but may annoy you nonetheless. From times to times you will find yourself facing enemies that spontaneously were brought to life right above you, and other times you will be facing an empty battle (this however doesn't mean you can't finish it, it instantly finishes as soon as your first guy has his turn). The battlefield will also be populated by invisible or nonexistent animals/vehicles, sometimes one added above the other, or if they do exist and are invisible they will not deter the LoS. One bug that is more of a curiosity than really a bug is that there you can buy two types of water canteens in one city. Both of them, however, are the same item but take different slots.
In case you'd like to hack the game, Tsumi has been nice enough to provide a few AoBs that will make your gameplay more interesting instead of easier. Both of them allow you to customize your gameplay (one by allowing you to place as many points you want in the initial generation, saying bye bye to the hard limit of 10 points on a single stats) and the other by allowing you to play the deathmatchs directly in the Konghack site (and probably NG, hasn't been tested however).