The Great Whale Road (Early Access)

The Great Whale Road is a game I really want to love, and it’s easy to see why. There’s a lot in there TO love, and a ton of elements that are right up my alley: RPG combat in an early medieval, "Viking Age" setting, complete with blood, honor, oaths and valor, old school weapons that can cause bleeding, broken bones, and more. It’s all overlaid with a beautiful art style and fun story-choices that range from logical (“Rats are on the ship! Should we bash them to death?”) to the insane (“Pray to the gods to deliver us from this infestation!”). As an Early Access game, I am very, very excited about this title. Unfortunately, to get where it needs to be, Sunburned Games is going to need to step it up in a few departments. At this point, it is difficult to actually gauge how far off The Great Whale Road is from being the game it could be.

What! We Spear-Danes in days of yore...

The Great Whale Road plays like a mix of The Banner Saga, X-COM, and the old Oregon Trail. The game is divided into two main sections, summer exploration and winter planning, but regardless of the season, your responsibilities as leader consist solely in strengthening your people and protecting your village. In the summer you will travel the Great Whale Road (an Anglo-Saxon term for the sea), fighting, trading, amassing resources and generally taking care of business, Viking style. In the winter, you hunker down, solve squabbles among your people and hope that you prepared adequately for the cold as you watch your food dwindle and your elderly die. Every year you take stock of your supplies, assess your needs and allocate points accordingly among 5 categories: Food, Warfare, Diplomacy, Traditions, and Craftsmanship. As long as you can make it through the winter, your people will praise your leadership and they will thrive.

This is a great system, and sets up some interesting choices. For example, I want warriors. I’m all about pleasing the gods through blood and thunder. That’s how I get down. However, before I pour all my precious points into Warfare, I have to consider some things. Would a couple points in diplomacy help me on the road? Can I stab my way through any problem I encounter on my journey, or should I try to develop a bit of a silver tongue? Ok, fine, just a point or two for Diplomacy, then a dump-truck full of points for Warfare. Woo-hooooo! Well, shoot. All right, maybe a couple of points for Craftsmanship, since that is linked to Diplomacy, after all. Gotta have good stuff to trade if I want the good stuff from the merchants. Ok, now all the rest of the points into Warfare, no doubt about… uhh, maybe a couple in the Traditions category, since I want to come back to a happy, hearty people who have been busy cranking out new warriors for me. People get hungry through, so a couple points for farming and hunting wouldn’t go amiss…you get the point. It’s a lot of fun to see where you can skimp, hoping to the gods that you can get through one more season, promising your village that next year you’ll really invest big in husbandry and defense.

Did learn of folk-kings' glory in battle...

While traveling the Great Whale Road, your progress is based on the story-driven decisions you make. You can sail directly to your destination, or stop at one of the many diversions on the way, be it a fishing village, a seemingly unguarded campsite, or a fast approaching ship that may or may not be full of bloodthirsty raiders. Each of your men (or women) will have a different opinion on any given situation based on their personality. Some of your men are cautious, some are godly, some are hot-headed and so on. Their opinions become your choices, as you, their leader, decide whose advice you want to follow.

Even simple things like passing another ship can result in some interesting and occasionally tense encounters. One of your captains will urge you to attack while they still have their guard down, another might nervously mention that their ship looks more like a raiding vessel than a trading ship, while your third man may point out the ominous clouds on the horizon, and encourage you to head inland and avoid the entire mess. These choices are interesting, and are absolutely necessary to break up the monotony of sailing, plus they are pretty fun. At first.

The problem here is that the choices and situations repeat over and over. Rats in your food? The same choices will affect the problem in the same way over and over. Storm coming in? You can be pretty sure that pulling down the sails and moving inland will save you every time. A few times I got some variety (after pulling down the sails to avoid a storm, a crew member who got drenched died afterwards), but most of the time I got the exact same result. I understand this is the early access, but there has to be more variety here to sustain interest, especially since the sailing can take a long time. After stopping the rats from eating your food for the tenth time it starts to get a bit tedious.

The ability to engage enemies in battle on the open seas is a nice touch, and these fights open up some interesting-looking battlefields that are generally smaller and a little tougher to navigate then typical battles on land. Which is well and good until you ask yourself one question: why bother?

As of my play through, engaging enemies in combat doesn’t seem to help much at all. Being a warrior badass (in my mind at least), I engaged every foe I could get my hands on. Most of these fights didn’t seem to benefit my tribe at all. I don’t gain experience, I don’t get to loot their goods, I don’t gain favor with the gods… nothing. So what is drawing me into battle when I could easily skip it? Even scripted battles, like the one where I was casually assaulted by some jackass in front of an entire village, don’t offer you a satisfactory conclusion, even after destroying the aggressor in combat. Even a half-paragraph blurb about embarrassing my enemies or showing the townsfolk that I’m not a man to be trifled with, or the option to hire the man’s warriors to my side would help the games’s immersion factor immensely.

The way it is now makes the combat feel unnecessary, which is a big problem. When I see a ship of warriors on the open ocean, I just raise sails and hustle away until it’s all clear, then I go on about my business. In a story-driven, RPG-style game like this, there has to be some kind of incentive to fight besides “the combat is fun”. And the combat is fun, but it isn’t without its problems.

How the aethelings feats of valor performed!

Combat in The Great Whale Road centers around a random card system. Each of your warriors can carry three cards, and you can shuffle none or all of these cards every turn to receive new ones. You can use the cards to bolster your defense, your offensive attacks, call other heroes into battle, etc. I am a bit divided on this system. On the one hand I like the randomness of it. On the other hand, it’s pretty annoying when the enemy is calling in 2, 3, 4 warriors and I am spending my turns desperately shuffling my cards, hoping to pull a hero card so I can get some men to even the odds. I would prefer a better system here, since the randomness will surely lead to your doom if you can’t pull hero cards quickly enough.

Another feature that would be nice to see is swapping cards among your warriors. Pulling a hero who hits hard is great, but when you have two tank-like characters on the board it would be nice to have cards that aren’t just more heavy attacks, big defensive boosts and so on. The ability to swap cards would open up a bit of depth in the system, especially if the ability to “accept” a card from an ally character could be unlocked through a skill tree or once a certain experience level is reached.

With that said, the combat is still enjoyable. You move your pieces across a hexagonal chess-like board, attacking your enemies, calling in new hero characters, using cards and trying to destroy your enemies while trying to avoid getting cornered or having your main hero killed, which instantly ends the battle. You can use attacks that break bones and sever tendons, which will lower enemy mobility, defense etc., which is a nice touch.

While fun, I feel like there needs to be more to the combat. I was still enjoying it a few hours in, but there seems to be depth here that I am not understanding, because the game is not explaining it, or perhaps it just hasn’t been implemented yet. You are kind of left to your own devices to figure out the bulk of the combat system, and it’s hard to not just bum-rush the boss every time. No matter who you are fighting, if you kill the boss, the fight is over. This would be okay every once in a while, especially if the story called for it, but when you go into every fight knowing that only one soldier on the entire battlefield really matters, what is the point of killing the other soldiers, especially when it doesn’t seem to benefit me at all? With a few tweaks, the combat could be quite a bit more engrossing and engaging.

Being an early access title, there are some expected glitches here and there. Once I turned down an offer to swear fealty to a foreign prince, but he was generous and gave me some coin. Then he did it again. Then he did it again. Definitely not complaining, but getting paid three times for the same thing was clearly an error. Once, while sailing to Ribe for a side-quest, there was no way to activate it. I went everywhere I could, spoke with everyone, but was unable to activate the quest. The worst glitch I found was when I hit a wall where no matter what I did or said to a character, I could not engage him in the fight we were supposed to have. Instead, the game kept sticking me on the loading screen until I restarted the game. I had to create an all new campaign that time. Bummer.