I just finished this game and I had to head right over to my blog to review it. Actually I'm lying, I just finished it a second time, but I am here now to review it. I got it as a gift from my friend +Pranoy Ghosh and despite its flaws I thought it was a really solid and fun experience.
The game is a bit of a Cinderella story with the developers having left Bioware to found their own studio called Stoic in order to make the game and managed to actually raise the funding they needed to make it in a single day on their Kickstarter page. It was published by Versus Evil and it is currently available on the PC and mobile devices, but by the end of 2015 it should be available on the PS Vita, PS4 and the Xbox One.
Something that immediately struck me about the game was how beautiful it was and the sheer quality of the production value of its artwork. The developers chose to go with a hand drawn two dimensional style for the game's overworld and combat area and while this isn't as technically difficult to do as a fully rendered three dimensional world that doesn't make it any less impressive. In fact I can confidently say that 'The Banner Saga' is not only one of the most beautiful games to come out in the last year but will be one of the most beautiful games to come out for the next few years due to their choice to stick to two dimensions. Aside from the choice of two dimensions the artstyle in the game was made to look a little cartoony, not in a comical sense, and this allowed the visuals in the game to skirt the uncanny valley pretty nicely creating a very detailed world filled with equally detailed scenery and characters with dozens of tiny details and quirks that you could see from the immensely detailed drawing.
The game isn't just beautiful though, which is good since beauty alone can never really carry a game. It has what I felt was a very solid combat mechanic with a decent amount of depth. The developers chose to go with a turn based combat mechanic that was laid out over a grid map, something fairly common in older games like 'Final Fantasy Tactics' and hundreds of other games. This style of combat is making a bit of comeback though since the success of 'XCOM: Enemy Unknown' which proved that the mechanic mentioned earlier is still something that people enjoy.
The gimmick that 'The Banner Saga' has going for it in its combat is that all characters aside from their unique special abilities have both an armor and health bar that determines the damage they take as well as the miss chance they have on their attacks. The health bar does double duty as both your strength and life gauge, whenever you attempt to attack an opponent your strength will be compared to their armor the larger the gap in your favor the more damage you can do, but if the gap in their favor you will have an increased ten percent chance of missing for every point in the difference between your opponents armor and your strength. This situation can obviously be altered by smashing your opponents armor so you aren't stuck and it creates a fairly nice element to combat where you have to decide when to go for health and when to smash armor. There is the additional element of willpower and exertion in the game that allow you to add additional points to your attacks with willpower being the currency to pay for this additional power and exertion being the skill that determines the maximum amount of will power you can pay per turn and this adds a nice third layer of depth to the combat as you have to ration your finite amount of willpower in order to make the most of it in the combat engagements.
This is where the game started to get a bit iffy for me, there are other elements to the game aside from the combat but none of them seemed to have gotten as much attention as the combat. As the story follows you running from one location to another, caravan management becomes a fairly prominent part of the game. You have to manage morale, food consumption, combat engagements for your group of followers and decide on the small random events that happen as you travel. I didn't have much of a problem with the random events in the game or the various ways they could effect you by lowering morale, taking food or straight up killing one of your characters. It gave the world a bit more depth by adding a nice level of stress and weight to the choices being made in those events with the lack of clarity of the consequences of those choices that you were accepting. However, I didn't enjoy the lack of clarity in the food consumption or morale though, its never clearly stated how much food your party consumes per day or approximate measures of distance from one location to another in order to help me grasp how much food I might want to bring with me. The fact that the currency used to buy food is the same currency required to level up your characters is also really annoying as you have to balance between the combat strength of your main party and the survival of the caravan with any point that you spend incorrectly either way causing a massive amount of regret. The lack of clarity in the morale also bothered me as you didn't know when morale was going to drop from great to normal or from normal to poor which was annoying, what was even more frustrating was that I never noticed any impact from the level of morale on any other aspect of the game, I understand there was supposed to be some impact but it was low enough that it was imperceptible to me which bothered me since it made morale a pretty meaningless mechanic. Fairly unobservable impact isn't unique to morale though, in the larger engagements and battles when you act as a general before jumping into the turn based combat mentioned earlier, you are given tons of options to decide the lay out of the fight but I never really saw a major impact between any of the choices that made the entire exercise pretty meaningless.
The narrative in the game I felt was good, it attached you to the characters that were involved, the potential deaths of characters from events like I mentioned above also made it a little tense if you made sunk your development point into them or had grown attached to them. The developers say they didn't want to do a tolkienesque world and as a result themed their lore after Viking mythology which isn't that much more unique in my opinion. This isn't to say it wasn't a nice change of pace, but I felt it was a little pretentious to pretend that the choice to do that was some kind of artistic miracle. I didn't know prior to writing the review that the game was part of a trilogy and as a result the story felt like it wasn't finished when I had completed the game. There was a major plot element that was introduced and just never addressed again, the game simply ended once a secondary threat was eliminated leaving me a little unsatisfied. Aside from that the world building was fairly nice, you get a decent amount of depth regarding the lore of all the races in the game, the various locations you visit and their collective history. The music also helped to increase the immersion as it added this nice general feeling of hurried action and bleakness to it all. I felt genuinely interested in the world and I was engaged by it, granted I was pretty annoyed that I didn't have the choice to visit any of the dozens of seemingly cool locations mentioned on the beautiful yet totally informative map that you could access during the game.
The depth of the combat, the beauty of the visuals, the fairly detailed lore of the game are all reasons I would recommend that people play this game. Yes it has a number of flaws, some of the mechanics outside the combat are pretty meaningless, the narrative is handicapped by the fact the developer is using this game to build a trilogy and its a really short experience that will only last between six to eight hours. But despite all of this, the game is still a strong and compelling experience that should keep you gripped to your seat the entire time, I finished the game in one sitting on my first go in fact.
Something that immediately struck me about the game was how beautiful it was and the sheer quality of the production value of its artwork. The developers chose to go with a hand drawn two dimensional style for the game's overworld and combat area and while this isn't as technically difficult to do as a fully rendered three dimensional world that doesn't make it any less impressive. In fact I can confidently say that 'The Banner Saga' is not only one of the most beautiful games to come out in the last year but will be one of the most beautiful games to come out for the next few years due to their choice to stick to two dimensions. Aside from the choice of two dimensions the artstyle in the game was made to look a little cartoony, not in a comical sense, and this allowed the visuals in the game to skirt the uncanny valley pretty nicely creating a very detailed world filled with equally detailed scenery and characters with dozens of tiny details and quirks that you could see from the immensely detailed drawing.
The game isn't just beautiful though, which is good since beauty alone can never really carry a game. It has what I felt was a very solid combat mechanic with a decent amount of depth. The developers chose to go with a turn based combat mechanic that was laid out over a grid map, something fairly common in older games like 'Final Fantasy Tactics' and hundreds of other games. This style of combat is making a bit of comeback though since the success of 'XCOM: Enemy Unknown' which proved that the mechanic mentioned earlier is still something that people enjoy.
The gimmick that 'The Banner Saga' has going for it in its combat is that all characters aside from their unique special abilities have both an armor and health bar that determines the damage they take as well as the miss chance they have on their attacks. The health bar does double duty as both your strength and life gauge, whenever you attempt to attack an opponent your strength will be compared to their armor the larger the gap in your favor the more damage you can do, but if the gap in their favor you will have an increased ten percent chance of missing for every point in the difference between your opponents armor and your strength. This situation can obviously be altered by smashing your opponents armor so you aren't stuck and it creates a fairly nice element to combat where you have to decide when to go for health and when to smash armor. There is the additional element of willpower and exertion in the game that allow you to add additional points to your attacks with willpower being the currency to pay for this additional power and exertion being the skill that determines the maximum amount of will power you can pay per turn and this adds a nice third layer of depth to the combat as you have to ration your finite amount of willpower in order to make the most of it in the combat engagements.
The narrative in the game I felt was good, it attached you to the characters that were involved, the potential deaths of characters from events like I mentioned above also made it a little tense if you made sunk your development point into them or had grown attached to them. The developers say they didn't want to do a tolkienesque world and as a result themed their lore after Viking mythology which isn't that much more unique in my opinion. This isn't to say it wasn't a nice change of pace, but I felt it was a little pretentious to pretend that the choice to do that was some kind of artistic miracle. I didn't know prior to writing the review that the game was part of a trilogy and as a result the story felt like it wasn't finished when I had completed the game. There was a major plot element that was introduced and just never addressed again, the game simply ended once a secondary threat was eliminated leaving me a little unsatisfied. Aside from that the world building was fairly nice, you get a decent amount of depth regarding the lore of all the races in the game, the various locations you visit and their collective history. The music also helped to increase the immersion as it added this nice general feeling of hurried action and bleakness to it all. I felt genuinely interested in the world and I was engaged by it, granted I was pretty annoyed that I didn't have the choice to visit any of the dozens of seemingly cool locations mentioned on the beautiful yet totally informative map that you could access during the game.
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| So many places I want to go to but I can't because the game won't let me. |
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