Broken Roads Review — Feeling Down In The Down Under

Broken Roads is an RPG set in the post-apocalyptic outback. Here, your choices are not so black and white, not as easy as good or evil, and will often be the difference between life or death and the lesser of two evils. The game’s excellent writing is heavy, dreary, and full of character, making for an adventure you will not soon forget. It’s full of decisions you’d rather not have to make.

An immediate interesting facet of Broken Roads is the apocalypse itself.

It’s what I would call the boring kind of apocalypse: nuclear war, big desert, yadda yadda. It lacks zombies or other supernatural or sci-fi elements that other apocalypse settings might have, and it adopts a more realistic look that lacks the exciting flair of something like Mad Max.

However, it isn’t without charm. Broken Roads makes their apocalypse interesting by going the “grandfathered in” route. In most settings like theirs, we follow people alive before the apocalypse. Broken Roads adds an interesting element to its characters and world by making the apocalypse a few generations deep at this point. Every character grew up in this hellhole of an outback, and that reflects in how they behave and interact with each other and the world around them.

I found the character creation to be especially interesting, specifically when it came to your origin story. I’m a little bit of an edge lord when it comes to my writing and character preferences, so I, of course, went with the Hired Gun background, which spoke of my background growing up as a trained killer for my cruel parents, working as their personal rentable mercenary until I found the courage to run away from home. An absolutely tragic and awesome backstory.

I was a little disappointed by the lack of physical character creation, though. When it comes to your character’s appearance, you don’t get to customize anything, and you just have to pick between some presets. However, these models look really good, and when you get into the rest of the game and see the depths the developers have gone to in other areas, it begins to make sense why they may have “skipped out” here.

Another astoundingly interesting part of character creation is the morality quiz, which is the first introduction to the morality system itself, which you’ll see plenty more of in the game.

This quiz saw me answering questions about hypothetical scenarios you might face in the apocalyptic outback and how you might respond to them. Each decision pushes you a little further in the direction of Humanist, Nihilist, Utilitarian, or Machiavellian. I ended up with a cone split between Humanist and Utilitarian, which I’m happy to say is the closest to being what you might call a good person that Broken Roads has to offer.

As the game quickly reminds you, however, there is no such thing as a right or wrong choice in Broken Roads; there are only shades of grey. This is so much more than just a tagline, which playing the game would quickly force you to realize.

The very first of many difficult choices you face involves a small family: A mother, her son, and the father he shot dead. You stumble upon the father’s corpse, cradled in the arms of the mother, and the son shaking and crying not far away with the gun in hand. I won’t spoil how this goes down, but I was shocked to find that I didn’t disagree with any of the choices you were given the prompt to make, something I sincerely don’t recall ever feeling in other RPG games, even ones that claim to be morally ambiguous.

This trend continues as you follow your created character on their trek throughout the outback. Whoever you become, be it a psychopathic murderer who protects their party above all else or a bleeding heart humanist who puts their own people in danger to help strangers, you can’t even say that your decisions are completely wrong or that you’re a hero or a villain. You will simply be what the wasteland needs you to be to survive.

Though dark and depressing as the game can be, it’s often also full of hilarious and sometimes even heartwarming moments. If I’ve learned anything from some of my favorite comedians (Randy Feltface and Michael Cusack), it’s that so-called “Aussie Humor,” at least as I’ve seen it, is hilarious. This game can often reinforce that with some of its more lighthearted character interactions.

Oh, and by the way, Tina is my absolute favorite character. Of course, I complimented her conductor’s uniform.

Much of the game is dialogue, with much of the gameplay being about how you react to the storytelling around you. The game has a story it wants to tell, and like I’ve said before, the writing is excellent, if at times heartbreaking, so getting through it is hardly a chore.

When the game isn’t all bout dialogue and character interaction, it feels a lot like playing a tabletop RPG. D&D players will quickly understand the attribute-based, familiar-looking character sheet you can fill out during character creation. Combat also feels much like a dangerous encounter in a tabletop game, with a turn order rolled at the beginning and attacks based on invisible dice rolls.

Of course, technically, this means you have a miss percentage on your attacks, something I’ve gone on record as saying that I hate. Alas, try not to hold it too much against Broken Roads. The game is clearly inspired by classic RPGS of both pen-and-paper and video game origin, and we can’t expect them to write a fantastic story and reinvent the wheel at the same time. That would make it Baldur’s Gate.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Broken Roads is available on Steam.