Broken Roads

I'm a huge fan of the ISO RPGs like Fallout 1/2, Wastelands, Colony Ship, etc. An hour into this one, I was obsessed. It has a cool setting, interesting characters, and a compelling opening story/chapter. 10 hours in, I was getting pretty frustrated by the buggy quests, tedious leveling, and incessant "raster scan the mouse slowly around the entire map trying to find the one tiny place that your quest item is hidden". By hour 20 I had learned some interesting things about various schools of philosophy, but was desperately trying to get the game over with while figuring out which quests were actually broken vs. just poorly conceived and executed. Then the ending happened and it was impossibly frustrating. The end boss was way, way too easy, and then the end cutscene had nothing to do with the way you played the game. I wanted to love it, and for a few hours I did. But I can't recommend the remaining 20 hours of irritation so have to give this one a No.

I'm just going to assume that no one is going to look at a two year old game with barely over 50% positive reviews and decide to drop $35 on it, but obviously don't do that. I picked this up on sale after the developer made some detailed promises about upgrades that don't seem likely to be delivered upon any time soon. With that said, I tried it out for a bit of time and found the bones of a solid CRPG to be in place. The intro doesn't make the best impression, with a bunch of nearly empty areas and voice acting for a few lines, but nothing else. Weapons are uninspired, with a lot of examples like shotgun, shotgun +1, shotgun +2, etc floating around. Skill development is fine, if rudimentary and somewhat limited. The morality system basically boils down to good vs selfish, but at least most NPCs call you pretentious for referring to it. Combat is perfectly capable if uninspiring. Eventually, the story opens up a bit more and you get a lot of side quests to mess around with. At least using the English only version halfway through the game, I didn't see any particular bugs. It's far from a great game by any stretch, but it's a perfectly acceptable CRPG for $10-$15.

Visually impressive, Broken Roads has a lot of promise, but it hasn't been updated for almost a year now. The developer says he is working on other projects, so don't expect patches anytime soon.

I would have given it a positive review until I made it through 25% of the game. At that point, many quests are broken, including the main quest line. NPC's are not at the locations they should be to interact with them, a task needs to be done but there is no way to produce the dialogue point required to proceed, etc. There is no indication what one needs to do to make the option available. For example, the Koorda problem has been publically discussed with the devs 2 years ago and yet I experienced the very same thing. It's too bad because the game could have been positively good. 25/100

It's with a heavy heart that I give any indie RPG a thumb-down, but this one deserves it. Everything about it is so half-baked and not up-to-the-par that there is no other way. Here's my breakdown: 1) Quests: this is the biggest problem. The game is 95% fetch quests. You talk to one character, then go and talk to another character, quest complete. There is no sense of achievement, there are no obstacles to overcome. Scavenger's Hunt type of quests constitute another 2-3%, and I just don't find them very fun, too. 2) Narrative: frankly, I was permanently confused about my characters' goals. After the prologue ends, you're left without any particular direction. Sure, there is a hub town with quests, and the whole map to explore... But WHY? Something as simple as "Find out who was beyond destruction of your town" main quest would at least give SOME direction to the game, but it's just not there, so all you can do is blunder about and hope that you will somehow arrive at the ending. The ending, though? Comes pretty much out of nowhere. Also, the plot is too close to Fallout and Wasteland. I know it's hard to build a different kind of a plot in post-apocalyptic wasteland, but surely there is some way to avoid "evil organization wants to impose its will on everyone"? 3) Bugs and bad design: area transitions are not marked clearly and sometimes are obscured by static geometry. And you can't rotate the camera. Simple highlighting of exits/entrances would have done the trick, but it isn't there. Bugs are mostly ironed out... But I still got the wrong ending slide (I choose Not To Do A Thing, and the slide was all about how I Done The Thing). 4) Combat: impossibly easy and mostly boring, it still provides a reprieve from the endless fetch quests, to I found myself if not exactly enjoying it, then at least not dreading it, like in some games. It's quick enough, and very, very easy: the enmies rarely outnumber your party, there are no "boss battles", and your firepower scales faster than enemy's, plus you get to use some magic. 5) Graphics: the only nice thing I can honestly say is that the game looks good enough for an indie RPG. Not mind-exploding, of course, but entirely serviceable. So... No, I can't recommend this game, even for people like myself who are ready to play every turn-based isometric RPG that comes out. Although at 10-15 hours it doesn't eat too much of your time, so if you're a complete completionist, I guess go for it. I surely did.

Got two quests with broken triggers in the early hours of the game. Took it as a sign of things to come and simply left.

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 inconsistencies make it feel like quest states are not properly tracked. This kind of design flaw is far more frustrating than crashes or visual bugs, because it directly undermines player choice and exploration two things the game clearly wants to encourage. I don't know if the game going to receive any further patches but there really is good game in there. I would recommend waiting for patches before picking this up. As it stands, it is hard to justify investing time into a game where progression can break so easily.

storyline is broken, not very intuitive, the game might be broken, i dont know, its too hard to follow any dialogue. morality compass broken from the first mission.. Devs have abandoned the game so it wont get fixed. OK with the fact i paid $12 for it.

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 characters I'm told to talk to are nowhere to be found on the map, or they don't have any dialogue options relevant to the quest, and even after assuming I'm a dumbass despite the tons of games I've beaten over the decades and googling what to do, Google tells me to go talk to X character in X map and the character isn't there or has no dialogue relevant to the quests just like I'd already confirmed, so I don't have any other option but assume the game is bugged to the point of being broken and no amount of older save files has made any difference. Too bad, because I was having fun with the game and enjoying the story, characters and experience, and I was fully on board with finishing the whole game if it'd only let me. That's a very low bar for a video game, and it's unacceptable that this one fails to clear it. Edit 2: Changed the review back to positive since the developer was cool enough to contact me and help me fix the bugs, and I really appreciate it, especially since I was genuiniely enjoying the game before the problem I encountered made it impossible to continue progressing.