Broken Roads

There's potential here, but it doesn't work out. Broken Roads is a game that takes place in post-apocalyptic Australia that doesn't really pull from Mad Max, which is something I find refreshing. Something it DOES do which I enjoyed is that it wears its clearly home grown Australian roots on its sleeve, not just in the obvious haha teehee drop bears and giant spiders way, but in little ways like how some of the little healing items you find are very clearly snacks that people who live in Australia would know about and have. A lot of local slang used in dialog and environment descriptions, I really like it, it always nice when people from a place make a game that takes place there and it ends up feeling that much more authentic than the alternative, which is a big AAA studio walking up with a mask going "HOW DO YOU DO FELLOW AUSTRALIANS?". The game opens as you'd might expect, after character creation and picking an origin you're a new guy in town walking in from the Outback trying to find your place and getting to know your new neighbors, checking out the immediate area around town, learning how the game controls and works. The problem with this set up is that you can probabl…

This game looks more like a cartoon RPG. You have to do a LOT of reading in this game. That makes it no fun at all. If anyone wears trifocals, then you will have a hard time with this game. I tried to like this game but with all the reading & the cartoon graphics, I got a refund as it was not fun at all.

I went into Broken Roads really wanting to recommend it, and I feel bad that I can’t. To be clear, I have a pretty high tolerance for bugs and jank, especially in indie RPGs. From a purely technical standpoint, the game is mostly playable. I only experienced one soft lock during a battle, and performance overall was acceptable. The real issue is not stability, it is how often the game breaks its own quests. Roughly 40% of the quests I encountered had some kind of issue. Aside from very basic objectives where you are simply required to kill something, most other quests were broken in one way or another. The most common problem was progression breaking due to sequencing. For example, I fixed objectives while exploring before officially receiving the quest, only to later meet the quest giver and realize I could no longer complete it. In some cases, the game would force a failure state because the required interaction was no longer available. There are also cases where you can trigger dialogue that clearly belongs to a quest before that quest even starts, or NPCs asking for items you do not actually have yet the game still lets you hand them over and complete the objective. These i…

On the surface, Broken Roads is a game I should love: a post-apocalyptic CRPG with a heavy philosophical flair, exploring the nature of humanity while surviving the wasteland. I gave it several hours to sink in, desperately wanting to give it the benefit of the doubt. To its credit, the foundation is okay. The art style and voice acting are genuinely good and establish a solid vibe, and you can see the faint outlines of what the characters were supposed to be. Unfortunately, that’s where my purely positive impressions end. Gameplay & Exploration Mechanically, the game feels like it's missing a core ingredient: the fun. Combat: At best, it's uninteresting; at worst, a total slog. There is no real incentive to build variance into your party members beyond your main character. Exploration: A frustrating mixed bag. It’s slow, involves tedious backtracking, and relies heavily on spamming the Tab key to find interactable objects. Quest Progression: Doing or saying the wrong thing can violently jerk your character forward in the narrative with zero context. At one point, I said "no" to an NPC, and suddenly I was in a warehouse being threatened. Later, I was abruptly in a new town bec…

Really wanted to complete this game, liked the strory line, graphics are ok, even lived with the clunky navigation and combat mechanics which slowly grown on you. But when most of my quest log ends up being bugged out quests that don't seem completelable, I need to abandon the game. I saw in forums the developer was very active fixing stuff a year or two ago, but apparently never finished (not even close). It's a buggy mess :(

I recently played the Shadowrun trilogy and I was in the mood for another CRPG that wasn't set in some medieval fantasy land, so I was wondering whether to play Wasteland 2 or this one and I ultimately decided on this one to give a smaller game with no attached franchise a try. Much to my surprise, it turned out to have a tone that's really reminiscent of the Wasteland games based on the demos I played, but on top of that ended up being a sort of appropriate bridge between Shadowrun and Wastleand because, and I was not expecting this part, Broken Roads has actual magic spells and, just like in Shadowrun, though you do have to reload your firearms in combat, you don't have limited ammo. I'm having fun with the game and managing my expectations given its reputation for game-breaking bugs, but also somewhat trusting that the patches and updates might have fixed most of the issues the game had when it first launched, since I can see recent reviews saying they had few or not issues, while other recent reviews claim it's still a buggy mess. Edit: Changed my review to a negative because I got to a point where I just don't know what to do and I can't progress any main or side quest. The…