Carrier Trail is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Oregon Trail (Copyright Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Carrier Trail is considerably worse than Oregon Trail.
Just like Oregon Trail, this is an RNG stat grinder as you progress from step to step, each step triggering a random event which makes you make a decision or otherwise erodes the set of stats you have to juggle as you progress through the game. Simple stuff, the gaming industry moved on from games like Oregon Trail decades ago, except for a few holdouts hoping for some kind of viral success gained from stealing the nostalgia from other games. This doesn't result in products with high value for gamers, especially considering it's not hard to play Oregon Trail for free if you really want.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the poor choice of using node-webkit/NW.js instead of a serious game engine. This is a very poor quality toolset for gaming, sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities because it's primary function for games is to make simple HTML/browser/simple mobile apps rather than full fledged PC games (and given we are here for PC games, you can see why this is a problem). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Carrier Trail didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for drinking a potion, trivial to get, but less than 29 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 8 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Carrier Trail has the ridiculous, laughable price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
[b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
