Quick Review: DETOUR

I had heard that roadwork was a cutthroat business, but this is ridiculous!

Why did the road cross the map?

Developed by Geoff ‘Zag’ and Richard Keene, published by Geoff Keene and released to Steam on May 16th, 2011, DETOUR presents an interesting take on a resource management sim, by combining it with real-time strategy. You are a new hire to a roadwork company, building roads that lead from factories to the rest of the world. To do this, you create streets, bridges and tunnels leading a truck across a map. You need to spend credits in order to build a road on a square of land or send a truck going. The fields have other types of obstacles such as unbreakable mountains, as well as things that can help such as gold mines to get more credits or pre-built roads and towns to save some money. Get three trucks across the map, and you win!

That's still the easy part. Wait till the others
join in.

It’s not gonna be that easy, however; soon, you’ll encounter opponents who also work in the business and who want to get their trucks through before yours. This is where the real-time strategy comes in. To cause trouble, both you and your opponents can plant bombs to destroy squares of roads, packs of nails to incapacitate trucks, or cause hippie protests in the other’s path.

And yes, opponents is plural. After the first set of 9 levels, which serve as a tutorial of sorts, we jump into the meat of the action, where both genres are combined and you have to deal with three opponents who are also trying to get ahead. There are three sets of 9 levels total, for a total of 27. Though if that doesn’t sate your real-time strategy resource management, you can go down to Multiplayer and either get this game for your friends and play against them, or play against CPUs.

Oh nice, the opponent is throwing a bomb
or two my way. Such healthy competition.

This one’s not too great. It’s a novel idea that’s been seldom (if ever) done before, but the execution doesn’t do it justice. 27 levels isn't much, but the levels compensate by being somewhat long. The biggest offender is the difficulty curve; after you complete the first 9 levels, you’re thrown directly into the competition against 3 CPUs, all playing savagely. You don’t even have time to adapt your strategy to the map! What’s worse, even if you can work the menus efficiently, most of the tools come with nasty drawbacks; as an example, if you blow up a few squares of road, you must wait for “the dust to settle”, meaning that nobody can build on those squares for a couple more seconds – further hindering you if you were on the receiving end of that maneuver by an opponent. Things get chaotic when four opponents are tossing bombs at each other.

Each of these explosions might as well pop a
big F YOU up on the screen.

There isn’t really much of a story, and the characters aren’t too great. (Also, one of them has a really unfortunate name.) I wouldn’t call this one worth trying out. No need to make a… detour towards it. …Alright, that was bad even by my standards.

Also, its developers have moved on to making better games. Anyhow, if you do want to try this one, DETOUR is available on Steam for 1.99$ US.