What seemed like a unique tactical quirk in multiplayer quickly becomes tedious and rote in single-player, and this is exacerbated by the half-baked War system. Because of the weird initiative system that determines turn order – where each side moves a single unit at a time and turns always alternate between players, meaning that if you have two units and they have ten units you get to move each of your guys five times in the time it takes them to cycle through theirs once – it’s always far better to cripple an enemy so that they can do almost no damage instead of finishing them and taking them out of the turn order entirely. Battles become unwelcome speedbumps to your progress in the caravan and plot side of things rather than a fun challenge, to be rushed through as quickly as possible with no real thought given to tactics or abilities beyond Swarm Enemy -> Break Armor -> Cripple (second step optional).

There’s very little progression as you eke your way through the wilderness you fight the same enemies in the thirtieth battle as you do in the third, and by that point you’ve mastered the tactics required to beat them down a long time ago so that you’re just going through the motions. One problem is the extremely limited number of enemy types, which can be boiled down to “big baddies”, “big baddies with shields”, “small baddies” and “archer baddies”. How this happened is a little bit of a puzzler when it’s using exactly the same ruleset (see the preview linked above if you want to know the detail), but I don’t think it works anywhere near as well when applied to a single-player game with repeated battles against an AI opponent. The primary mechanics of the game are the multiple-choice decisions that pop up every now and again and the turn-based tactical combat, but the sad catch is that the combat doesn’t even come close to living up the promising system demonstrated in Factions. The supplies are either acquired through events or by buying them whenever you reach a settlement and morale is improved by stopping the caravan and resting neither of these are particularly deep systems but they do lend your progress (or lack of it) an air of desperation when you run out of food with no idea when you’ll be able to get more and people start dying from starvation. The premise of the game is that you’re in charge of a caravan of refugees fleeing from a unstoppable destructive force encroaching on your lands from the north, and that you have to manage supplies, keep morale up, defend the caravan and make key decisions that (in theory) have far-reaching consequences. Stoic hit nearly all of their design goals, for all that the Banner Saga is very, very late: the best way I can describe it is as the choose your own adventure segments of King of Dragon Pass (if you haven’t yet played this game go and get it off of GoG and thank me later) mixed with the interesting tactical battle system they trialled in their Factions multiplayer offshoot.

Looking back at the original Kickstarter pledge I’m not sure I particularly have the right to be disappointed in this game. The Banner Saga is proof that fantastic art and atmospheric music do not a decent game make.

The banner saga art