It costs just $8, but Dustland Delivery has the depth and complexity of a mainstream, studio-built RPG. You can see the inspirations. The vehicle and crew management feels like it comes from FTL: Faster Than Light, the washed-out, lawless, apocalyptic world is right out of classic Fallout, and the strategy elements and economy systems owe a lot to SimCity and Factorio. But Dustland Delivery stands on its own merits. One of PC’s true unappreciated gems, if you haven’t played it yet, there’s a giant new DLC that makes Dustland Delivery feel almost twice as big.
It’s the end of the world. Resources are scarce, life is cheap, and the wasteland is overrun by zombified former humans. Initially, all you have is your truck. It needs fuel, tires, and engine coolant, and your job is to ferry supplies between the final remaining human settlements. The opening hours of Dustland Delivery can be dizzying. As well as maintaining your vehicle, you need to upgrade your character, find weapons and armor, recruit and safeguard your crew, and make sure you don’t starve to death. It’s an old-school-style RPG and strategy game with genuine friction, and an expectation that you will fail, die, and learn as you play. Once you learn its language, though, Dustland Delivery opens up into one of the most absorbing games on Steam.
There are simple ways to make money. One city, for example, might be surrounded by fertile land and therefore able to grow a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, but lacking in industrial machinery. Another city, a few hundred miles away, may have a good line in engine parts and tires, but not much food. The first city, they have a lot of produce, so you buy it there because it’s cheap and then ferry it to the second city, where its scarcity makes it valuable. While you’re there, you load up on steel and rubber, which they can sell you in bulk, and then take it back to the first city, where they’ll buy it at a premium.
The values of goods will change as you play and they’re dependent on your own in-game decisions. Ultimately, you start to expand your operation, making alliances with the various, warring factions to ensure the lowest prices for the best stock and grinding out new supply routes to make every run easier.
Already gigantic, the new Dustland Delivery DLC, Sheol, adds an entirely new transport system in the form of abandoned subway tunnels, which you can use to navigate the world below ground. There are new subterranean cities and factions, new ruins to explore, and an entirely new set of story quests complete with 20 side missions.
If you need more convincing, 89% of Dustland Delivery’s lifetime user reviews are favorable. Recent reviews, as in those posted in the last 30 days, are even more glowing – 94% are positive. The Dustlands Delivery Sheol DLC is out today, Wednesday April 2. You can find it right here.
Otherwise, you might want to try some of the other best games like Fallout, or maybe the best survival games ever made.
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