Broken Roads – Broken Roads Review – It's not just the roads that are broken

War really never changes

Allow me to tell you about the beginning of my adventure. Broken Roads is one of many RPG post-apocalyptics that we encounter today. Global conflict for one reason or another, use of nuclear weapons, survivors fighting in a world that has become lawless, you know the drill. Small feature this time, the action takes place in the Australian desert, where I have just joined a small group of mercenaries responsible for ensuring the protection of a neighboring village. Things are obviously not going to go as planned and we are going to find ourselves in the middle of a conflict between several powers in the region.

Wasteland kangaroo sauce

The character creation phase begins with an original choice which will have little importance in the progress of the game. Four choices are offered, each with bonuses to the attributes and skills of your character. Next comes a screen for choosing your character's appearance for which we cannot really speak of customization, followed by a morality screen, an important point of the game to which I will return in more depth in the following paragraph. Finally, we finish with a screen for assigning attribute and skill points. The system is classic if you have already played this type of game: six attributes (strength, agility, wisdom, charisma, etc.) linked to a dozen skills. Each skill has different levels which unlock a bonus once reached. Nothing crazy in what is offered here, it is even very reasonable compared to other games of the genre.

In fact, the originality of Broken Roads is to be found in its system of morality. Rather than a classic good/bad or loyal/chaotic axis, the game chooses a more philosophical approach to the question. Your choices during the game move you on a moral compass divided into four quadrants, each corresponding to a philosophical leaning. Pragmatism, Humanism, Machiavellianism and Nihilism will be the four main axes of the game. Each of these quadrants contains what the game calls “moral traits”, passive effects, both positive and negative which will benefit the character as long as he retains its philosophical bent. To help us predict variations, a compass is present on the dialog interface. It tells us in real time the impact that our responses and choices will have.

Choices and inconsequences

Broken fights that we would like to forget

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There, you say to yourself that Broken Roads is a game where choices and decisions matter. That's probably the case. In theory. Because when playing it, we sometimes have a hard time feeling the importance of our decisions in the game. The first hours are edifying in this regard. level. The dialogue almost all offers us answers that influence our moral compass, but I never felt like I had any say in how events unfolded. So I chose the Mercenary origin, hired as a guard for a mission in a neighboring town. Once there, surprise, it is impossible to help the city in question when the need arises. I can't even approach the area, blocked by an invisible wall. In its defense, the fights in Broken Roads are rather dud. They take place in turns, during which each character can move and perform actions. Unfortunately, the representation of the fights is quite confusing. The absence of a grid is a problem, because it makes the scope of our attacks difficult to read. It is therefore common to find yourself out of range to attack after a move. In addition, the lack of control over the progress of our companions when gaining levels often makes them moderately useful in combat.

We therefore understand that Broken Roads prefers to focus on its narration. Which is not a problem. Disco Elysium Or Torment : Tides of Numerena did this successfully, for example. But these two examples immediately took players into their worlds and the game mechanics served this narrative. This is something I never felt in Broken Roads. Worse, the quests offered to us too often sound like filler. How many quests, in the first few hours, boil down to just walking a few meters to talk to a character, then returning to the quest giver to receive a big chunk of experience? We thus gain levels without having done anything notable, leading the player to completely lose interest in the events.

Brokeneeee…

No really, I've searched everything thoroughly, I don't think there's anything left to find

By starting the game from the beginning with another origin, we realize that the problem with the game is deeper. Like its title, some paths the player can take seem to be broken. They lead to quests that remain blocked without us really knowing why. The quest is still marked active, but with no objective to accomplish. This is the biggest problem I had with the game's narrative and quests. Too often, the game leaves the player to their own devices, telling them absolutely nothing about what is expected of them to progress. Which quickly becomes frustrating, since you don't know if you are the victim of a bug. Navigating Broken Roads right now therefore feels like a roll of the dice. If you're lucky, you'll get through the game without encountering any issues and potentially reach completion within a few hours. Otherwise, you will find yourself facing a confusing and poorly designed game. To make matters worse, the French version available at the time I write this test adds yet another layer of confusion. Between sentences that mean nothing and the options in the dialogues that repeat themselves, we feel that there is still work to be done on this point as well. Broken Roads might be a good game one day, but not today.

Conclusion

I take no pleasure in writing a strongly negative review. This Broken Roads review is no exception. I have no doubts that Drop Bear Bytes put all his heart into the game. But the result is simply not up to par. Whether in terms of the narrative, its quests or its mechanics, the game displays far too many shortcomings to offer a satisfactory experience. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Broken Roads. Not in its current condition and not at this price.

Test carried out by Grim on PC using a copy provided by the publisher.