Broken Roads Review – Classic Fallout Still Has A Place
I approach a small, dusty settlement full of eggheads selling books, glaring at their monitors and experiments, and dozing off as strangers come and go. With all of them so preoccupied, it’s easy to wander up to the control panel of their enormous death laser at the center of town. Pressing buttons frantically as I peer side-to-side, I arm the weapon, aim it at the outpost, and fire. Everything goes dark.
Broken Roads is unbelievably open in how it lets you approach each and every quest. I could have fired that death laser at the gate, letting raiders in so they could shut down the weapon themselves, thereby avoiding any bloodshed. Instead, I continued the cycle of mass destruction and wiped out god knows how much scientific progress with the press of a button. But it fit my character perfectly.
Set to the backdrop of a beautifully hand-crafted post-apocalyptic Australia, you’re a traveller helping a displaced town restore their home in the face of stuffy bureaucrats, cultists, and would-be conquerors. The world as we know it might be over, but mankind continues as it always has.
As you play, your morality shifts along a compass composed of four quadrants – nihilist, machiavellian, humanist, and utilitarian. It’s an incredibly refreshing approach to the binary morality systems of games like Fallout and Mass Effect, and offers you the chance to not only more carefully construct your character’s values, but let them grow and change as the game unfolds.
I started out as a careless nihilist. The world is over, and any chance of it being brought back from the precipice of annihilation is so slim it doesn’t bear thinking about. My first priority is survival, and any risk to that isn’t worth taking. That mindset is immediately put to the test the second I leave the tutorial when I find a woman crying while she cradles the corpse of her dead husband in the middle of the main road. Off to the side, I see her son still holding the gun.
He’s on edge and clearly willing to pull the trigger. We’re strangers here, and if even his own father wasn’t safe from his fury, what chance do I have? I could try to salvage this mess by avoiding another needless death, but as he aims squarely at my head, one path becomes clear. I take him out with a single shot. But as those around me recoil in horror and my reputation starts to dwindle, it’s clear I can’t continue this way.
Later, I see a town burned down in the middle of the night, its inhabitants slaughtered in the streets for the crime of refusing hospitality from a stranger. A bigger mystery is unfolding and my care for those I travel with grows, so my nihilism begins to subside. I start to favour more humanist choices, no longer taking the easy way out. Bit by bit, I become a good person, growing from a careless mercenary, only here to do a job, into someone willing to put it all on the line for those I trust.
The moral compass allows me to weave my own story. My character isn’t just an empty vessel for me to put words into the mouth of, they’re my own tailored protagonist with a carefully constructed arc. Binary karma systems are too rigid for that flow to feel organic, but the moral compass allows me to gradually shift my standing and, as I do so, unlock more and more choices through the game that better fit who my character is becoming.
Broken Roads wears its inspirations on its sleeves. It’s a Disco Elysium, Fallout, and Baldur’s Gate style cRPG with turn-based combat and a world made up of smaller zones that you travel between on a world map. We’ve seen this kind of game a dozen times now, but the more organic morality system is a fresh take on a tried-and-tested system that has been long accepted as the standard, and it makes it even easier to immerse yourself in its world.
It isn’t dwarfed by the games that precede it, because it isn’t just clawing at nostalgia for the good ol’ days of a top-down, turn-based Fallout. It’s bringing that style to the modern day after 26 years and taking it even further, with slicker, more intuitive combat, and far more roleplaying capabilities. The art style likewise gives Broken Roads an edge, as instead of the oppressively bleak wreckage of the old world in games like Wasteland and Fallout, we see an almost painterly depiction of Australia.
The smoother brush strokes transform demolished towns littered with broken tires, wooden pallets, and crumbling benches from bleak and dreary to optimistic. Humanity nearly wiped itself out but clutched onto survival and kept going, and while the world may be in disarray, it’s still beautiful. Every scene oozes a hopefulness so infectious it’s hard to stay nihilistic.
Broken Roads is an ode to the cRPGs of old, but it’s also a step forward for the genre, showing that the ‘90s approach still has a place today. The turn-based combat is punchy and responsive, the art style is gorgeous, and the roleplaying capabilities brought about by its revolutionary morality system lift Broken Roads out of the shadows of its inspirations and into its own spotlight.
Broken Roads
Played on Steam Deck
- Beautiful painterly art style.
- Moral compass is a refreshing take on binary karma.
- Intuitive combat system used sparingly.
- Quest directions aren?t always clear.
- UI often feels clunky to navigate.
Read original article here: www.thegamer.com
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