Growing up almost exclusively with home consoles, I promised myself that if I ever purchased a powerful computer, then I would take the time to see all of the comp gaming that I've been missing out on. The Banner Saga is my first Steam purchase, and I am seriously impressed. There aren't many RTS games that I really enjoy, in fact Starcraft, Xcom and C&C Red Alert are the only strategy games that I can even think of that I put more than 40 hours into. The Banner Saga is just as good as those games I just mentioned, and somehow accomplished it by doing nothing the same. At all.
The graphics are hand-painted and gorgeous. They look good in these pictures, but when you play the game yourself and see these Dragonlair-esque bright colors moving around the screen, you'll definitely notice them and find yourself blankly staring at your monitor, admiring. The cutscenes look like an updated 70's fantasy cartoon, making me reminisce about The Hobbit cartoon, or even the Disney Robin Hood. I was sucked right in.
The Banner Saga's setup is radically different from that of Starcraft or Xcom because it refuses to get unnecessarily complicated. You move into range, and then you strike, turns alternate, and hack away at each other. When the game first begins, you'll notice how strategy is nonexistent. Like the Braveheart battle, you just charge ahead and hope your big guy drops their big guy first. Your soldiers start leveling up and getting promoted however, and soon you'll have archers laying trap tiles on the field, and Backbiters slamming people 5 squares back with their shields. Every character has an armor and a health bar, hitting the armor opens them up to big future attacks, and hitting the health brings them closer to death. The end and the beginning are unrecognizable, starting with hack n slash and finishing with tactical battle precision, The Banner Saga has now joined my super exclusive list of timeless RTS masterpieces. It's 24.99, get it, now.
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