 A work of art that deserves more. The gods are dead. The sun hangs immobile in the sky. Now giant stone creatures are flooding the land and threatening all of humanity. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Now two caravans must travel across the continent to make a final stand. This is an independent game successfully funded by Kickstarter. The fact that a small team was able to create something like this is reason enough for you to purchase it regardless of my commentary and opinions.
1. Gameplay
Just a quick word of warning, while the age rating for this game recommends 10 years old, this game may not appeal to an audience that young. It’s a slow game that involves conversations and a potentially confusing combat system. If that doesn’t seem like a problem, don’t worry about it. The Banner Saga is an interesting game that could have used a bigger development team and more time. It was an indie game which got its start on Kickstarter, so the dev team was very small and had limited resources. The end result is a beautiful game, but one which lacks real complexity. There was (and still is) a lot of potential, but for the most part that potential remains completely untapped.  The artwork is extremely impressive. If you pick up this game, take a look at the map. The whole thing is ridiculously detailed. Each location can be selected to learn a brief backstory of that location’s history, its importance, and its current state. I would have loved to travel all around those locations looking for new adventures and quests. Unfortunately, the story follows a very linear path. The story is set with one or two minor choices that the player can make along the way.  You'll look at images like this for hours. The meat of the game comes in getting your caravan to survive the perilous trek across the landscape and in fighting enemies through a turn-based combat system. The trek is fairly boring, but the beauty of the landscape and the occasional text-based conversation or mini-quest break up the monotony. Combat is a bit more interesting. The player gets a handful of characters to use and upgrade, each with interesting abilities and strategic importance. It’s a bit like chess, but with the ability to choose which pieces to use.  A simple yet complicated game of chess... Overall I liked this game. I want to see even more in the future. I want to be able to explore the open world, to not be so dependent on supplies, to have choices where there isn’t necessarily a “best” option. These types of things may not be possible for an indie dev team, but it would be nice for the future.
It took me around 14 hours to complete this game, but about an hour of that was from backtracking to prevent some of my main characters from dying. This game does have a good amount of replayability (especially since the player will have no clue what he’s doing the first time through). There are some interesting achievements and an alternate ending. The combat was fun and I would like to see future content for the game. The story was good but I found the combat much more interesting (considering most of the non-combat action was just watching the caravan move along). So players that enjoyed the combat will likely want to replay the game. Those that don’t enjoy the combat will definitely not want to replay the game.
The combat in this game has some tricks that the player will have to learn (or, as in my case, be told about) in order to remain competitive to the end. Strangely enough, the combat mechanics discourage the player from killing opponents. Instead, the player will have a much easier time if he damages enemies as much as possible without killing them. It’s a very strange, counterintuitive system that could quickly get frustrating if the player doesn’t take advantage of it. However, the thing that I found more frustrating is that the main characters had a habit of disappearing randomly in the story. Renown points, used to upgrade characters, were also used to buy supplies. This meant that every time the player upgraded a character it was a very difficult choice. This would only be made more frustrating if he chose to spend points into a character that ended up dead or missing somewhere down the line. The worst example of this comes when two of my main characters end up getting killed in the same scene for an action I did two chapters previously. I was given no opportunity to save them. Considering I had spent a tremendous amount of points on those characters, my best option was to go back and redo the previous chapters to make sure the event didn’t happen. I was not happy about having to do that. 2. Gameplay
Surprisingly enough, violence is a somewhat rare event in this game. While it is the second most common thing the player will do, the amount of time spent attacking enemies will be dwarfed by the amount of time staring at the caravan as it makes its long, slow trek across the landscape. When a character lands a hit in combat, the effect depends on the type of attack and if the attack damaged the enemy’s health or his armor. Armor hits will only emit a spark and make a shattering sound. Health hits will cause a small amount of blood. These two attacks are 90% of all combat the player will see in the entire game.  That's about as much blood as you'll ever see. There is only one scene where “gore” is present, and I put that in quotes for a reason. One of the characters gets into combat against an extremely powerful enemy. The text explains that the character ends up having his arm completely cut off. The picture shows the character lying on the ground but does not show his severed arm.  His other arm is missing. Trust me.
Sexuality is not a factor in this game.
Occasionally there will be events where characters drink. These are usually times of celebration. In a select few of these, the player can choose to have a main character get involved in these celebrations. This is often the best choice the character can make, since it often raises morale (which is extremely important in the game).  That's not me. These are the only times when substances are included in the game.
Gambling is not a factor in this game. 3. Other Factors
While there are no official modding tools for this game, the developers have made all of the source code and files available to the community for potential future modding. My brief search has not found any mods available yet, but that doesn’t meant they won’t exist in the future. For now, though, mods are not a factor in this game.
Religion does come into play in mild ways. The game explains that the gods are all dead, which has major consequences for the world and the people that live on the world. The player will occasionally find “godstones”, which are just huge rocks carved into shrines for a specific god. These allow the player to learn about each of the gods and their specific role in the world.  This one is for the god of bling. He likes wearing gaudy necklaces and having massive curly glam metal hair. However, since all of the gods are dead, the player never gets to talk to any of them.
Anti-law is not a factor in this game.
There are no multiplayer modes for this game.
Extreme sports are not a factor in this game.
There are a couple of characters that call themselves “weavers”. These characters are able to manipulate energy in small ways. This can include healing characters, creating energy shields to protect against attacks, or using a sort of chain lightning ability to damage enemies.  The woman shielding herself from the worm's fire blast is the weaver. These characters don’t appear until later in the game, and only one of them is usable in the party. He has the ability to repair friendly units’ armor and to use chain lightning against enemies. Once he was available I almost always brought him into combat. I could also make an argument that the gods’ creation abilities are magical, but they are never seen during the game. They are only discussed as part of the lore for the world and the characters.
There are no additional factors in this game.
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