met a taxi driver who gives life advice and possibly kidnaps people. 10/10

I yearn to be back on the road

I had such a blast playing this game as I love games that change based off you're interactions. (I played The Walking Dead Telltale Series and Firewatch right before this) And I found myself going through all the choices I made and how I would have done them differently in the end.

I'm not sure how re playable it this game is but I've heard it has three different endings so I'll likely revisit in a year or so

Good Luck on the Road Young Blood's

I had heard a lot of good things about Road 96 and, after seeing it stay at 'Overwhelmingly Positive' reviews for a while, I decided to pick it up. I was really excited to start playing, but unfortunately I was very disappointed. It seemed like they were going for a telltale-style game with multiple different character/storylines, but completely missed the mark. The main theme is an interesting one, but it completely lacks in what makes choice-based games great.

- The dialogue is very cliche, cringey, and unrealistic (which for a political choice-based game is very important).
- The same handful of character models are repeated over and over again just with different hair styles/colour and clothes, which can quickly remove immersion from the game
- The animation of the character's is awful, especially when talking. It is so distracting.
- The choices and decisions you make don't really change much at all except for maybe 1 or 2 main ones within any given storyline. You can be either horrible or lovely to a character, and they will treat you the same no matter what. It really does not matter what choices you make.
- There are reoccuring characters within different storylines that you interact with, and I found that they were consistent between storylines. For example, in my first playthrough I met a character named Zoe. While she greeted you, it was made clear that she prefers travelling alone and that she doesn't want to travel with you, no matter how you try and convince her (trailer-park chapter). However, in my next storyline, Zoe instantly wants to travel with you, and becomes you're best friend playing connect four with you (hitchhiking with strangers chapter). These were the only times I had met Zoe, and back-to-back she goes from being apprehensive and not wanting to travel with other teenagers, to then going and instantly befriending this random other teenager and wanting to travel with them to the boarder! It was so jarring and contradictory. This hitchhiking chapter was made clear that it was set after the trailer-park chapter. So I don't know what's happened in that small time frame for her to completely change her attitude towards travelling, but it was very distracting and made me lose any immersion I had in the game.

Don't get me wrong, there were things in this game that were interesting and fun (like the minigames, and the addition of money and how you choose to spend it to alter the storyline), but these features were completely overshadowed by the bad points I just listed. All of the points above I would easily look past if this game wasn't a politcal, very story-driven, choice based, telltale wannabe game, where the elements listed above are crucial to the game. This game doesn't have many other features to depend upon. What this game depends upon are interesting and unique characters that the player should grow attachment to along with choices that make an impact, which this game doesn't hit the mark at all. It's hard to become attached to characters or a story when character models are repeated constantly, have absolutely awful animations and dialogue, and are inconsistent with their choices and personalities.

I wanted to like this game, but it was just too bad of an experience to continue playing. Maybe it's just me, but I wanted to at least write these points down as I feel like I'm the only one talking about this.