Games Like Geargrave Outlands

Lead the convoy. Keep your people alive. Bring home what you stop.

Out here, anything with wheels on the horizon is a threat and a prize at the same time. A tanker worth more than your whole convoy. A road train with a crew you could use. A gang that would like your water.

Geargrave Outlands is a turn-based road-war tactics game about a convoy and the people riding in it. You plot the route, set the marching order, choose the formation, put the right hands on the right guns, and decide in every fight what you want to take home: the vehicle, the cargo, the crew, or nothing but a story.

You command the convoy, you don't steer it with a wheel: this is turn-based strategy, not a driving game.

Drive in formation

A convoy is not a pile of cars. Before the road gets loud you set the marching order: who leads, who rides at the back, who scouts ahead as outrider, and how much space sits between them. The lead rams through roadblocks and takes the mines; the rear takes the fire when someone is chasing you.

When the fight starts, the convoy moves as one. Set the pace (full throttle, march, ease off, halt) and give a formation order the whole column steers back into every round:

Play the cripple with a feint and watch a greedy gang go for the "wounded" car, then close the trap with two of your vehicles alongside. Combat runs on five lanes plus the shoulders, small enough to hold in your head and deep enough that every round is a real decision. Ram, sideswipe, throw a rope across, put a salvo into thin rear armour. You always see what each order will do and what each gang rig has committed to before you commit yourself.

Crews that matter

Every vehicle is driven, gunned and defended by people, and you only have so many hands. The driver steers; everyone else mans a gun, patches the hull, jumps across to board, or keeps the radio talking. A truck without a free hand is a truck without a gun.

77 named characters ride with you across both campaigns, each with a face, a voice and a past. They carry origins, loyalties, debts and grudges. Feuding factions in the same cab lose morale; war buddies fight harder side by side. Crew pairs who know each other pull off joint combo manoeuvres once a battle. Your people grow with every won fight and earn perks. They talk on the road, argue in camp, and sometimes walk away when the water runs out or you rob the wrong people.

Every travel day has a protagonist: one of your crew whose wager, grudge or bet colours the day. At sunset Cap, the convoy's robot bookkeeper, reads the day back to you as a chapter and stamps it with an audit grade, from EXEMPLARY to WRITE-OFF.

Every wreck is a choice

Salvage isn't a menu you clear after the fight. It's the point of the fight. What is left of a vehicle depends on how you stopped it:

Or skip the shooting entirely. Send your politician to the negotiation table, read the other side's leader and talk an entire gang into a deal. Every enemy has two health bars, hull and morale: break their nerve and you take the whole thing intact.

The same rule cuts the other way: a rig you lose on the road stays lost.

A day on the road

Each travel day is a run between two towns before the road sweepers close the corridor at night. Pick every leg of the route: highway or wreck field, canyon or dried riverbed, a short cut through bandit territory or a long detour. Pull over for a stranded tanker, a parked car that still runs, strangers waving you down, or a fuel stop nobody else has found. When dust rises behind you, decide whether to outrun the pack, dump cargo, fire the counter-measures, or turn and fight.

Water is one per head per day. Diesel is the difference between a shortcut and a detour. Tires die on the dirt. The map forecasts your stores in plain language ("lasts 5 days") and warns you before it punishes you, so a bad run is a story, not a spreadsheet ambush.

Your fleet is built from what you kept

Vehicles don't have classes. They have builds, and the builds come from what you're carrying. A ram plow, a monster-truck chassis, a lucky dashboard mascot, a veteran driver: each one pushes a vehicle toward one of seven Road Doctrines (Ram, Sniper, Boarding, Negotiation, Roadblock, Rush and Warranty) and its once-a-battle capstone. Nothing is bought from a skill menu. Everything comes from the machine you actually drive, and very often that is the machine you boarded last week.

Later in the campaign you rebuild a ruined town and win the Roadhold: a rolling road train you fit out module by module as the convoy's mobile base.

A wasteland that remembers

Five major factions and three regional powers hold grudges and favours, and their gangs fight by ten distinct doctrines: the Field Greys' shear-wall, the Rust Wolves' blood-debt (a pack that never flees), the Cult's bait-runs. Release prisoners and word gets around. Rob them and it gets around faster. Recruit an ex-cultist and suddenly the cult will talk to you.

Every enemy is a person, not a statblock: each gang member has a name, a face and a role, and exactly one of them is the leader. Put the leader down and watch the rest reconsider.

And it's funny, in the way the end of the world is funny

A mayor who washes his white limousine with drinking water. A cult that worships the Great Discount and reads a 41-meter receipt as prophecy. A sniper who talks you into hiring him with the story of every disaster he caused. Neon dashboard mascots, holy to extinct pre-war cults, that grant real combat bonuses and cost you something every time.

Only two things survived the apocalypse intact: the road sweepers and the car insurance industry. So if you'd rather not bet a rig on your own planning, Geargrave Outlands is, as far as we know, the first car combat game that lets you take out an insurance policy. What the policy is called has nothing to do with what it covers. The small print arrives by radio. We recommend reading it.

Currently in Early Access — and already a full game