Text is on the small side, and controlling the tactical combat view is a little fiddly - it's easy to stumble over your button prompts. But you can tell it's not a native console game. The principal joy of this version of The Banner Saga is to see the finely detailed artwork on the biggest HD screens the scenes of tiny figures walking across vast landscapes work particularly well. Taking maybe a dozen hours to complete, this part of the tale ends with a suitably hard-won victory, but you've done no more than keep the wolf from the door. And so it proves, in this episode at least (two more are planned). It is happening in real time, and is being wrought by forces much greater than you food is running out and people are turning on each other it doesn't seem like the end can be averted, only outrun. And I do mean about it, rather than just using the apocalypse as a motivation or a dramatic backdrop. This, then, is a game about the end of the world. I loved the eerie, counter-intuitive terror of this idea, and wish the game had made more of it, but it sets the scene perfectly. There's a still more worrying sign: the sun refuses to set, hanging low and immobile in the sky, day and night. (The Varl were created by the gods, but the gods are now dead.) Threatening both is an army of stone men called the Dredge, who have lain dormant since the last great war but are now pouring forth from the north, driving people and Varl alike from their homes.
In a fantasy land with a strong viking flavour, humans have made a fairly stable peace with Varl, a race of horned giants who live for hundreds of years but can't reproduce. The end result feels like something remembered (the game's tone and illustration style recall, for me, the wonderful World Mythologies books of my childhood) while being, in fact, refreshing and novel. Instead, it offered an original cocktail of references: Norse myth, apocalyptic fantasy, 1950s Disney art (the end credits - and one character name - pay tribute to Sleeping Beauty stylist Eyvind Earle), grid-based tactical combat, and - perhaps the key component - the classic survivalist text adventure about pioneer life, The Oregon Trail. Unlike many others, though, the developers Stoic, with roots at BioWare, didn't make a promise to resurrect or spiritually succeed a particular fondly remembered classic or moribund genre. The Banner Saga belongs to that first wave of games that attracted significant funding on Kickstarter by appealing to players' nostalgia. Already available on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
#The banner saga reviews Ps4#
Availability: Released this week on PS4 and Xbox One.But if, like me, you've let it pass you by, its appearance on Xbox One and PS4 this week presents a welcome excuse to catch up before a second instalment is released later this year. I'm not sure why it's taken two years since The Banner Saga's debut on computers for this handsome, world-weary tactical role-player to arrive on consoles.
Released on consoles at last, this elegantly grim adventure at the end of the world is that rare contradiction: a nostalgic original.