Ultimately, this is going to be a very subjective review, because ultimately, your experience with this game is going to depend heavily on how you feel about some very specific details. The Great Whale Road is a fresh take on the Banner Saga formula, using the Banner Saga engine. If either of those things has already put you off, you're probably not going to have a good time playing this. On the other hand, if you adore everything about Banner Saga, this might still not be what you're looking for. Let's dig a bit deeper, and I'll show you what I mean by that.

The Great Whale Road is largely an economic sim, but one that plays out slowly and is punctuated by battles. You have a village that generates resources for you, you have a ship that takes them out to trade with other villages, and you have a warband for when those trades go poorly. Your village is made up of several different meters, measuring population, happiness, and food supply. It also provides a range of bonuses to your warband, enhances your ship, and farms different kind of resources depending on what you upgrade and where you assign your population. Of course, to upgrade your village, you need specific goods, which come from trading. Meanwhile, your warband relies on equipment, which must be purchased by liquidating goods into hacksilver. These three elements of gameplay, taken together, make for a really engaging experience, where you're juggling your warband's ability to keep pace with the story fights vs your village's economic growth vs. your trading party's profitability.

Unfortunately, that's only about an eighth of the game.

And this is where the Great Whale Road falls flat.

90% of gameplay is watching a little boat sail for a few minutes, maybe clicking a response on a timed random event, then pulling into port, browsing several shops, assigning some people to hunt, selling the meat you get, and leaving. And if that sounds boring, yes. Yes it is.

The actual plots of the three campaigns (all of which are pretty long, but would be much shorter without the boring filler of sailing to fifty bland identical villages just to complete a single quest) are pretty good, and it's possible that the choices you make in them even matter. I can't be too certain about that, since a lot of your choices feel like Telltale decisions, but the writing is immersive and well-researched regardless, and I found myself liking even the characters that got only a few lines of dialog.

Like Banner Saga, the art here is pretty good--although not quite as breathtaking. It makes the samey oceans and samey villages more tolerable, and visiting a town for the first time is even kind of cool.

Unfortunately, here's where the game takes another dive.

Combat is boring. On top of that, combat is broken. Once you figure out how to play, you will never lose a fight.

Battles take place on a hex grid, Banner Saga's Armor and Strength system has been replaced with a more complex, more RNG-based health and armor system, and attacks have three damage types. Weapons have multiple hits, and the more hits the better a weapon is. Weapons also have different ranges, and units can go into counter-attack mode, striking out at the first person to wander into their range. Each hit has a chance of landing based on your unit's accuracy and your enemy's evade, but there's also a block chance on top of that. If your attack isn't evaded, it might still be blocked, dealing its damage to armor instead of health. Weapons have three types of damage, slashing, bashing, and piercing. Slashing glances off of armor, bashing deals a point of extra armor damage, and piercing deals both armor and health damage. If you whittle down a target's armor, you can swing straight at their health without a block chance, which usually results in a kill.

So, the way the game was designed, you're supposed to use bashing to create an opening, and then lay in with slashing for the kill. Or, alternately, pick away slowly at an enemy with piercing.

Which would work fine, if spears didn't exist.

The thing is, spears have two tiles of range, they have the highest damage output, they match the next best class for number of hits, and nearly all of them have the coveted peircing damage type. On top of that, the spear-using class, the Heavy, has an early special ability that pours on a bunch more hits. Taken all together, this means that building a good combat party is mostly about taking every Heavy you have, with a few Assault classes taken to fill in the gaps. By early midgame, combat is usually wrapped up in a turn or two, although even so, the cumbersome combat interface means it drags.

If that weren't enough to make this a diamond in the rough, the whole economy element is trivialized by the way food works. Both your town and your trading party need food to survive, so it should be a thing that you'd want to conserve, but each town has a hunting spot where you can just haul billions of rabbits out of the bushes, field-dress them, and pack them instantly into what I can only assume are Nordic MREs. This makes provisioning for journies a matter of taking as little as possible, so that your burly warriors can go out into the trees and come back with armfuls of stoats. You then sell your food at a premium, go through an obnoxious screen transition, and go hunting again.

Midway through your first quest, if you're doing things right, you're rolling in hacksilver.

And that's without doing the hunting dogs glitch.

(Did you know that when you send one dog out to hunt, sometimes you get dozens back? The Viking erra was a strange time indeed.)

So, where does all of this leave us?

At a very unfortunate conclusion.

I enjoyed this game. Unsanded edges and all, I liked what it had to offer, I enjoyed its setting and story, and I suffered through all its sub-optimal design decisions to get more of what it had to offer. It's not going to be everyone's preferred brew, but it's got a definite flavor to it.

If you're looking for something quick and polished, this isn't for you. But if you got really excited about any of the elements I mentioned, this is worth a try. I would advise picking it up on 50% sale, but I think the devs are worth supporting, and I would dearly like to see what they have in the pipeline next.

TGWR is a great game for the right people.

It's not an open-world and it isn't really that much of a freeform RPG.
Instead it's a story. A story in which you might be able to make choices that change some of the outcome, but the general way the plot goes stays the same.

For now, there is only one arc of the in total three promissed storys available, but, the one that is there, is very much satisfying and interesting enough.

The gameplay itself is a mix of choose-your-own-adventure style textwindows, in which you decide how to act in the storysetting and a rather simple but rewarding economy-simulation. You're the theign of a small village and you allocate your villages population to certain tasks.

- Here I have to admit that, while the mechanics in themselves are rather simple, they UI isn't really makeing a good job at explaining their interconections. For example, the Tradition-bonus is indeed stacking and makes a whole lot of sense to pick up and max out, as it increases the yields of every task, but the tooltip at the screen when you actually alloacte the population only shows the percentage by which the overall bonus will "increase" this year.
Or the fact that you can't check mid-voyage what resources you need to upgrade the parts of your village you want to upgrade. And while the map is a nice feature, I feel it's not very well explained and highlighted that you can check the goods sold in the villages along your current journey-path. -


Then there is the obligatory combat, realized by a two action movement/attack-action turn- and tilebased system. It's serviceable. While sometimes challangeing, espescially early, you gather up skills quickly and find yourself quite often useing the same tactics over and over again. I'll be honest, I think they would've had a more rounded game if they focused more on the trade/economy aspect and ditched the combat all together. Maybe made it into a "preparation-phase" and cardbased "choose-your-tactic" minigame.
As it is now, it's oftentimes a way too worthwhile option while at the same time being a slog, due to the limited unit-variety mixed with the shallow way to "interact" with the enemy. CC, for example, is in my honest opinion allmost useless, when you can simply outdps allmost every enemy-composition, while the somewhat limited AI (codeing a competent AI is pretty much one of the hardest jobs, without resorteing to flat out cheating) is easily tricked into takeing unfortunate positions.
What do I mean by that? Well, for example, there is the random event of you sailing past a ship which lies heavy in the water with no guards to be seen. The outcomes if you take the opportunity to loot are at best free very worthwhile loot, worthwhile loot after a easy fight (bonus warrior-XP) or just a fight. Unless you're fully loaded, there is no sittuation in which you shouldn't simply go and take their stuff.
There is also a barebones "loyalty"-system in place, which decides on which turn you can put your units into the fight, but it's mostly rendered pointless, since

1. the enemy allmost never start directly upon you, so you got plenty of time to wait and even kite them around

and

2. you allmost allways have 1 or 2 other units ready with a imidiate summon.

_____________________________________

Well, the game in itself is however still very satisfying to play. It catches you in a somewhat cliche but still very enjoyable plot and while some things are not as well rounded or fleshed out as I personally would like them to be, they never pull you out of the experience.

I personally, had no real bugs or crashes to speak off, despite maybe the fact that I sometimes couldn't choose an item to drop from my longboat to accomodate a lootitem I got during a landside-event.

If you like storyfocused games that have more gameplay than just "hold W and point your mouse at things", go for it. It's basically a different no-fantasy take on "Banner Saga" set in our history.

If you expect a openworld RPG where you go about being a fantasy raider-godking, you might want to look into other games, like Expedition: Vikings allthough that one IS BUGGY .

Definitly interested in the other storylines.

The Great Whale Road marks the Steam debut for Sunburned Games. This is a development studio based in Valencia, Spain. They are studio of ten people who have poured their heart and souls into creating a story-driven RPG with turn-based tactics and cards.


The game is set in the seventh century. You travel the famous Whale Road, the North Sea. It is up to you, brave leader, to not only save your clan but to make it thrive. As a result this is an epic challenge that is full of danger but also full of reward. It's not going to be easy. These types of games never are. But it will be worth it in the end if you are victorious and become one of the legends of your time.


The locations are all drawn by hand within the game. This is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the game as they are beautiful. They help set the mood and the atmosphere. They remind me of some of the old viking picture books that I used to read as a child. As a result, the graphics were a resounding victory for me and kept me playing.

The soundtrack appropriate for the time and the setting. I'd like to see an increased selection of tracks by the time that development is complete. A little too early to be too critical in this department but a more varied soundtrack would add to the richness of the experience.


Winter

The primary gameplay mechanic utilized here is that of two seasons - winter and summer. Winter is where you do your planning for the upcoming summer. In summer you carry out your actions and perform your quests. I found that this system has been well designed and that it works well with the game. Many players will feel somewhat at home immediately.

Learning how to be successful in the planning stages of the game is of vital importance. Here you get to allocate your points into a number of different areas such as hunting, farming, traditions, etc. In many ways these concepts are borrowed directly from city building or God games games where you control your populous.

During the winter a number of random events occur. I've played through the game several times now and each time I've gotten a different event on the second and subsequent events. The first always appears to be the same. Selecting the right option can give you a helping hand. However, I believe that if you pick the wrong option you can ultimately lose just as much.

Summer

The summer is the most active part of the game but no more or less important than winter. Summer is where everything is active. The gameplay forces you to think on your feet especially when you get into combat. Random events can and do occur throughout the summer seasons.

Summer is also the part of the game is where card and turn-based combat enters the play. This was a system that has been utilized in different games but the developers have honestly tried to implement their own version of it. Some of the changes were relatively tricky to come to grips with and I admit I lost early on, quite devastatingly so. However, I quickly learned that this is where even more strategy came into play. This is an area of the game that needs tweaking and refinement. It's not there yet but there is an opportunity for it to become more


I have a feeling that this will elicit quite a few negative reviews by players who only put in an hour or so worth of time into the gameplay. It's not for that audience. This is a game that will arguably take a couple of playthroughs before people truly appreciate the game and what it has going on. I wont suggest that there is as much going on as a Civilization game. However, that is the type of crowd that I believe the developers have targeted. I certainly had similar feelings starting out with this game as I did in my first hour or so of playing Civ.

There is a lot, arguably too much, to take in at first and you will probably suffer through periods where you feel lost. You may even feel that you're playing multiple different games. So be warned - the tutorial screens are your friends. Read them thoroughly and take your time to absorb the information. Please don't just rush right through them even though they are all able to be brought back. There's not much worse than having to re-read and re-read tutorial screens that you rushed through in the first instance.


I ran into a glitch in one part of the game. I feel that it is worth mentioning, however, it did only occur the one time. On my first quest I discovered a graphical bug when I attempted to click on the journal and subsequently the map. What happened was that whatever was supposed to load clearly didn't like what I was doing and refused to load. I ultimately quit my game and started again. Thankfully, upon reloading and not being over eager to do something I was able to continue successfully. Hopefully


This is really just the tip of the iceberg for The Great Whale Road. Though what has already been released with the Early Access release is one storyline the developers intend to release three more. There will be one each for the Northumbrians, Franks and Picts. The second half of the initial storyline is to be developed and released as well. The developers hope to strengthen what is already a very reasonable AI. They also want to improve the trade system (I wouldn't call it bare bones at the moment but it can use some improvements). There is much more to come.


No. The game has yet to make the additions of Steam trading cards or Steam achievements. As always these are a very simple addition to the game and will likely be added before the game leaves Early Access.


There are questions that you must ask yourself before I can advise you to purchase The Great Whale Road. Those questions basically boil down to whether or not you have the time to invest into a game that, if you find yourself involved, will demand your attention. Are you willing to provide feedback to the developers? If you are happy to provide feedback and have the time to commit to the game then I believe you will be satisfied with your purchase. There is much to learn and a sizable learning curve. It will frustrate some players but the game is worth it.

For similar reviews and our popular giveaways (including hardware) please consider checking out Steamified[www.steamified.com].

Sorry guys, I can't recommend it.

To preface this, I love this style of game. The art is incredibly well done, I love the attention to accuracy but I just can't do it.

You break too many basic principles of game design for this to be a recommended TBS title. I often found myself triple or quadruple clicking my units to select them. I don't mean I was selecting the wrong pawn, but nothing at all when I was clicking on my units.

The turn doesn't end when all units have used their actions. Everything feels clunky, and there aren't options to speed computer turns. These are really basic elements that need adjustment, and you can bet I'll be back once the usability has been streamlined.

As it stands, Battle Brothers, Banner Saga, Chroma Squad, these are all better examples of TBS fundamentals.

*Note* This is going to be somehwhat of a Rant because I'm ticked off at the other reviewers who haven't done justice to the community by brutalizing the game for short sighted emotional reasons instead of judging the game on its actual merit.

SO this is my opinion on what happened....You have a Huge number of Mount and Blade warband fans, battle brothers fans and expeditions conquistador fans who bought the game not based on what it is and appreciating the aspects of the actual game. Instead they are beating it up for not being like the above mentioned titles. I know this because I too am a huge fan with lots of hours on the above titles so I understand what they are saying, yet thats total bogus because thats not what THIS title is about and its killing the game for a lot of people who might enjoy this game for what it actually is.

-Honestly the bad reviews kept me away despite having seen this game and followed it for a little bit while it was in early access. I saw a lot of reviews bashing the game for what it isn't and I saw one guy write a friggen book about what it is and I still didn't really understand what the hell anyone was talking about. SO I bought the game myself and tried it out and this is my attempt to cut through the drama and anger and garbage and tell you the real deal.

#1 Most of the negative reviews are based on people being angry about not being able to do this or that....The game is story driven and that's okay. Nothing wrong with that....The tragedy is people see so much potential and want so much more that instead of saying that, they focus on what isn't in the game like its a flaw instead of appreciating what is actually there......To say the game is broken because it's not an open world is rediculous. Is banner saga an open world? Is The oregon trail an open world? NO.....SO first thing first.....Its okay to enjoy a story and want more...So in concluion its a story based title Like banner saga. Judge it on what it is.

#2 The world is rich and looks good for a hand drawn game. You start out choosing who you are going to be taking over the tribe. While I personally would of liked more character options again lets be fair, in Banner Saga for example you get two choices. You get two choices here as well and then it goes into a combat tutorial. The combat system is very simple to learn yet has enough for the tactical combat to be rewarding. I'm not sure why they raised the difficulty of enemies recently and I hope they take a look at that again, its not needed.

#3 After this you go into the city tutorial screen, this gives you an overview of the choices you make for winter planning and what your little villiage will yield based on your choices of where to allocate your people for what task. This is actually a deeper system then banner saga and is more rewarding since you are building a settlement instead of just fleeing all the time like in Banner saga.

#4 This is where everyone has issues, the main map where you decide where to go....You have to follow the storyline and go where the game tells you. Here is the real ♥♥♥♥♥ though and think about this....SO WHAT....Its a story driven game....Just like any game with a storyline, you have to go to the next place to advance the story. I Did't buy this game for a week because ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cry baby reviewers were unfairly saying its a bad game because of that. Could it be better if you could, yes, is it bad because you can't? No, it just is what it is.......So follow the story that is actually well crafted and go to the next place and enjoy what the game actually offers instead of getting bent the community a bunch of BS about it being bad.

In conclusion....If you like story driven titles with some light city management, tactial turned based battles and a great setting with a lot of random events during sailing (that you need to respond quickly to in real time) then give this a shot. If you liked games like Banner Saga 1 and 2. Any choose your own adventure or gamebook or games like the oregon trail then give this a shot. Yes The potential of the game and the devs is really amazing but lets not get confused with what could happen down the road with what content. I Played to year 3 in the game and experienced no bugs. Every computer is different so I won't go more into that, I can just tell you, I didn't have any issues.

I hope this is fair and balanced and I hope it gives you an actual idea what the game is about and what it actually offers, don't let these cry baby reviewers destroy a title for not being a big mac.

I've finished the game and I'm sorely disappointed.

Pros:
- Art style is beautiful
- Locations are eye-candy
- Concept of the game is great
- Combat is actually not as bad as everyone claims
- It's a mix of RPG and strategy

Cons:
- Plot and storytelling are terrible. You've got no choice and no control whatsoever of your character. Game is not only linear and tells you what to do. It also tells you WHY you do that and what you THINK while doing that. I'm not kidding.
It breaks any hope for immersion you can ever have.
- I do not enjoy playing a character that kills woman, children, priests, slaves etc. I completely don't care that vikings did it. My Banner Saga vikings didn't. Sadly game gives you no choice in this matter as well.
- Game is so riddled with bugs, blackscreens, freezes, crashes that it is amazing it came out of early access
- Performance and loading times are abysmal. I can run any AAA title in 60 frames yet here I get 5 second freezes trying to do anything.
- Mechanics are plain and simple broken. You wanty to upgrade your ship? Well too bad, none of the villages sells tin and copper this year. You can swim in money but if RNG tells you NO there is nothing can do nothing about it. Perhaps next year? No? Next year? No? Oh ffs...
- But it doesn't really matter cause game have only one difficulty setting and that is very easy. You will win always with everyone no matter what you do.
- Classes are terribly imbalanced - well in fact there are only two: assault and all the others aka "useless" class.
- There is a very little number of random events that rehappen every year. There is always a "good" answer, it is always a painfully obvious one and it always is the one using 21- century knowledge. Praying to Odin or "roleplaying" viking yarl is always the wrong answer, sadly.

I love King of the Dragon Pass and I really really enjoyed both Banner Sagas. This game is nothing like them.
Avoid.

I want to love this game. For most of it I do. The story is engaging and interesting, the exploration and choices are fun, if somewhat repetitive onboard the ship during travels, and the gear and loot gathering I find exciting. I also love building up my city and expanding my ship.

One area that frustrates me greatly is the complete lack of character choice other than male or female. I cannot pick my name, my class or skills, my appearance, or even the weapon I started with (I chose Flóki, the male “support-class” character which was one of two options at release.) I feel like he is the weakest character in my party most of the time, having poor armor and melee skills (though a fast attacking weapon is nice sometimes,) he's a support character which kills my interest in playing my own way (I'd enjoy being a front-line character, personally) and limits my weapons and skills to one default. It shatters my replay interest, and I imagine it's on the shelf until expansions come out someday as I don't want to be this same, relatively weak character with the same name, and backstory as my first playthrough.

So much is right with the game, but that huge design flaw hurts my enjoyment and severely limits the time I will put into this and my interest in recommending it to anyone.

There are some release-day technical flaws, which with character customization and more interest in the "hero character," I could overlook. The game does have some lock-ups, crash-to-desktop errors, inventory issues - an example being that food cannot go over 100 in your stock or it "rolls-over" and leaves only the digits after the one-hundred place (ex 114 becomes 14), often leading me to starve during travels, and when purchasing in stores sometimes you cannot buy items from the trader despite money and inventory space. I have also had random bandit events during winter where I fought off the entire bandit force except their lone archer. The archer had evasion so high you had sometimes less than zero percent chance to hit. Seriously, even when surrounded by five vikings they had 110% evasion. 10% below zero chance of being hit. I actually spent ten or twelve rounds sometimes trying to just hit them a single time using accuracy boosting skills. Something is wrong there.

All in all, I highly recommend the game for the story, city and ship building, exploration and freedom of choices, but the fact that the game is based around unchangeable characters and gives you zero option for customization beyond your limited armor/weapon preset, wrecks an otherwise fantastic game for me. If you don't care about being pigeon-holed into two lackluster characters and only want story in a Viking setting, this game is for you. If you care about who you play as and like to have some choice, this game is not for you.

I really want to love this game, I want this company to make a pile of money and to produce sequels. I just wish they would implement some form of character customization. I think they earned my purchase price, but I won't be buying DLC/Add-ons or a sequel if I am stuck in this hole.

It's good. Buy it before it's taken off Steam! :-(

Turn-based combat
Manage your village
Choices matter
3 factions to choose from
Replay value
Great music and effects

I had this game since it was released for EA and tried it on various ocasions.
This review is not a easy one.

What I love
- Atmosphere
- Art (all beautifuly hand drawn)
- Story (believable characters, also you can see that the developers invested a lot of their time to doing their homework regarding the setting)
- Writing (the writing is good, it is just about enough lenght and quality. It isnt by any chance too much overly complicated text that is long just for the sake of being long without being relevant to anything, so the people who are not native speakers struggle to not get lost in it - looking at you Torment: Tides of Numenera!!)
- Village customization and winter part of the game
- Events (will get to that later)

What I neither love nor hate
- Music (the tracks are ranging from iritating to absolutely forgetable to quite nice...)

What I dont like
- Events (While they generaly likeable, the problem is, that they are VERY repetitive. Some more than others (bloody trading ship trap and smoking hamlet). I played until the 13th year and still encounter new events. I really suggest the devs to put some script into game so events happen only once a year. I really dont want to encounter 6 smoking hamlets and 5 trade ship traps every year...)

What I HATE (not overeacting, really HATE)
- Combat (this is the most frustrating and experience breaking part of the game for me. Until you get your hands on better equipment and level up your characters, the combat basicaly goes by this scenario: ''You have 78% of hit and have 4 attack. The opponent has 15 HP. OK game, lets make it MISS, MISS, MISS, 1 DMG'' *REPEAT until turn 20*. This wouldnt be so frustrating and iritating if there was at least option to make the combat >FASTER<. It is extremely slow, boring and not challenging in the later stages of game. The combat basicaly make me save scum to avoid some radnom events (Looking at you, you damned ''unavoidable stucked trade ship trap'' which I for some reason encounter many times every summer... Did I mention I really hate the trade ship event?)

What is worth mentioning
- BUGS. This hame has them and LOTS of them. From black screen, load freezes, ship dissapearing while traveling, etc, etc. I could go on I've seen most of them. But I have to say that the devs are small studio and are actually VERY responsive and helpful, doing their best to fix them, given their limited resources. So I have to give them credit for that.

- VERDICT
I do recommend it. It needs more work on it and I dont think that it was ready for full release. But I like it and dont regret buying it for the given price.

EDIT: I have to admit that on my second playthrough, I realized that I have been missing many combat related mechanics and that was what made it very frustrating for me. I was still used to the ''card deck'' combat back from the EA. I still dont like it to be honest but I cant say its THAT bad...

TL;DR - The Great Whale Road, in its current form, is a decent TBS light RPG - There need to be more updates to add depth and additional content, but right it wouldn't be a challenge to hit $1/Hour. With further content updates, I expect to see this be very similar to The Banner Saga but with far more minutia and a longer campaign. It's worth the 15 USD even in early access, and should be kept an eye on as it has the potential to be a strong feature of 2017.

The Great Whale Road is off to a really strong start. It popped up on my radar in early August, and this December (2016) I decided to try it out.

The combat at this stage has been described as hard but is fairly simple if you don't try and get fancy with it - Simple squares with spearmen and an assault works perfectly.

The side quests appear to pop at given intervals, and the content provided at this point in early access is impressive, if a little slow.

Management aspects for the winter are relatively satisfying if somewhat easy to cheese - I'd like to see more compexity there with the different base resources being able to upgrade to higher tiers that sell for more if you've got the craftsmen to do it. I'd like to see a lot more depth and really get into the minutia here, because who doesn't want to manage a tenth century Danish settlement and watch it grow while simultaneously having the opportunity to go a-viking?

Travel time is slow - The events are mostly repetetive, and you do eventually get to the point where you hope that you don't get an unlucky combat roll which means that things need to be made more fun or alternatively worthwhile and exciting there. Random events need to see more variability, but I'm imagining that'll definitely come with more content updates given the breadth of what you can access now.

Longship upgrades could see a little more variability - Different prows would be supremely nice, and more customizability in general on that front (perhaps requiring different materials) would be nice. I'd love to carve a bloody path through my rivals and take their strongests prow.

In the line of customizability, I'd really like to see character skills expanded upon (ala Drakensang) - Gear choices as they stand make sense, but should have more ... variability. Restricting specific classes to specific pieces of kit restricts customizability. The classes ought to be defined by their abilities, not so much by 'Support wears a dress. Assault wears one kind of mail. Heavies wear a differnet kind of mail'.

All said, The Great Whale Road is ambitious and with further attention to detail and expansion I think that it could make a genuinely phenomenal game. I look forward to coming back to it in future updates, and really do hope that it picks up more attention as it goes along.