Broken Roads, developed by Drop Bear Bytes and published by Versus Evil for PC, Xbox and PlayStation is an Australian take on the Post-Apocalyptic RPG genre, drawing inspiration from the original Fallout games and the rebooted Wasteland series.
Broken Roads is set in rural Western Australia in 2131, a century or so after global nuclear war has ravaged the world and the survivors are eking out a living in the bush as a result.
Your character (coming from a number of backgrounds including surveyor, trader, or jack/jillaroo) has finds themselves caught up in a raider threat to local communities that’s threatening the entire region’s continued existence.
The plot is interesting enough, but I found it started running out of steam after a few hours, especially as I seemed to find myself just wandering around the Wheatbelt region of WA with only an ill-defined sense of what I really needed to be doing to advance the story.
One of the issues I really struggled with was how unlikeable a large number of the other characters I encountered in the game were. It really wasn’t a lot of fun spending 25+ hours dealing with people constantly implying you’re an idiot, talking down to you, or making it clear they’d really prefer you just racked off and left them alone.
The voice acting in the game, while undeniably Australian, is very inconsistent. Some of the voicework is OK, and some of it seems like they got someone’s mate from uni to do it.
I also found the static art (eg loading screens, cutscene slideshows) for the game unimpressive, but the in-game art was excellent and did a great job of creating a convincing, believable Australian setting.
Compounding my disappointment in Broken Roads were the design issues – for example, quests with unclear objectives, locations with nothing significant to do, firearms using more action points than melee weapons in combat, clunky combat, suboptimal inventory management, and more.
The actual dialogue writing part of Broken Roads is very good, however – none of the slang feels forced, and some of the item descriptions are particularly humorous too. This uniquely Australian part of the game shines through and was very much a highlight of the game for me.Overall though, I have been really disappointed by Broken Roads. There’s so much promise here, but ultimately I thought that instead of raising the bar, it ends up spilled on it.
