Broken Roads

A disappointing RPG with interesting but poorly executed ideas, Broken Roads lives up to its name in all the wrong ways.

Broken Roads neglects its best ideas, padding out its runtime with fetch quests that leave you asking "why am I here?" for all the wrong reasons.

There's half of an amazing game in Broken Roads. Trouble is you have to play the other half.

"Many of the mechanics aren't quite developed enough to feel meaningful"

In the moment, Broken Roads offers up creativity in spades, but the bigger picture story - combined with weak combat and a dry take on moral choice - never coalesces into anything especially entertaining.

I was excited to see my country represented properly in a video game, and that did happen. Sadly the game itself isn't worth a damn, it's a classic style RPG but none of my choices matter and I can hardly make any of them. The only real redeeming quality is the art.

It's a little pushy for boasting about freedom, but it'll definitely give you something to think about.

Ultimately my time with Broken Roads didn’t light up any of the parts of my brain that video games typically do on some level or another. There’s some promise at first with its distinct, all-encompassing cultural flavor. But the scenario holding up the setting only struggled to capture my interest. Combat was a similar vibe, feeling like doing chores in the middle of reading a middle of the road novel in a crowded genre. While cool on paper the morality system did more harm than good, overloading the dialogue and getting in the way of character and personality. Nothing in Broken Roads felt bad or, well, broken. But whenever I played it, unless I was chuckling at the slang translator doing something weird I was always thinking of other things I would rather be doing.

Broken Roads is a cult classic in the making. It hearkens to the best parts of games like Fallout 2, and many other CRPGs of the '90s, and it fits right in alongside classic Fallout and the Wasteland games. It’s flawed in some areas, with bugs in spots, but it offers tremendous role-playing and storytelling that make it more than worth your time to spend upwards of thirty or more hours in post-apocalyptic Australia.

While Broken Roads' combat system is not bad, it does feel a bit lacking when compared to other titles. The map sizes are rather small, the enemies and allies are not that varied, and there does not seem to be a lot to do, especially in the early game. Most combat encounters simply boil down to moving to a spot, shooting a gun, and then waiting for the next turn to come around. There are very few exciting abilities, but it feels like most characters play the same. Things improve as players progress further through the game, but nailing down the early game combat is important to keep players engaged, and it feels like Broken Roads fails to do that.