It looks like 2024 is the year of the ‘new studio’, and while this isn’t a bad thing, the result can be a little mixed because you never really know what you’ll get. Drop Bear Bytes is a relatively new player on the scene, having been founded in 2019 in the sunny land of Victoria, Australia. Their main goal was to develop a new narrative-driven experience and they wanted to do it with their first release, Broken Roads. Unfortunately, their initial release didn’t go quite as planned and they had delayed it slightly, the keyword being ‘slightly’.

Unclear release dates and delays usually mean one of several things: Development hell, internal issues, licensing troubles, and the list drags on for miles. However, while Drop Bear Bytes had to delay their first release, they did it to make sure their creation was as close to perfect as possible. Well, the wait is over and it was well worth the wait because Broken Roads finally got released into the wild on 10 April and you’re in for a hell of a treat. After a lot of teasing, updates, and further confirmation for the release, we finally got to take on the role of a gun for hire in a partially post-apocalyptic version of the Australian outback.

Your adventure in Broken Roads doesn’t follow the typical story tropes involving a big bad evil guy or some lengthy drawn-out sequence where you need to step up and become the hero. You do get some background as to what happened to the world though; Australia was caught in the middle of a nuclear war that wiped out most of the population, and the remaining survivors have to do what they can to rebuild and restore their homes. However, you come in as a hired gun, paid to protect a small group of people who just want to maintain their way of life as scouts for a community but we all know peace doesn’t last forever and there’s a lot more happening than can be seen at first.

While escorting the scouts to a neighboring town, chaos strikes, and as can be expected, it came in the form of raiders with a ton of firepower. Sadly, there’s a lot more to discover and it’s now up to you to help your newfound ragtag team of scouts to rebuild, and maybe get a little revenge. It’s not just a battle with guns and knives you’ll be dealing with, but a moral battle too as your choices will impact everything going forward.

Starting off in Broken Roads, you’ll need to create your character. However, there are some ups and down here. Broken Roads seems to maintain a close relationship towards realism and you won’t really have many options to customize your character with, aside from using the presets, which can be a little boring. Though this gets nicely offset by creating your backstory, starting class, and setting your moral compass through a little quiz. No, it’s not a long quiz, it’s a quick little test just to get your origin started and everything can still change later on.

With your preset look picked out, you can get to the interesting part of creating your new hired gun, the origin. This type of detail isn’t exactly new to narrative-driven RPGs but how it was executed is somewhat new from the looks of it, and this is mostly centered around the Moral Compass. Now, the Moral Compass in Broken Roads is an interesting approach to affecting conversations along with how those choices affect the world, but it’ll also affect you and your party’s stats. You can think of it as an alignment of sorts where you’ll be able to lean towards one or two corners of the compass, namely: Humanist, Utilitarian, Machiavellian, and Nihilist.

Digging a bit deeper into the compass and its effects, you’ll also learn how there isn’t a right or wrong, it becomes a matter of perspective and it’s all driven by your own morals along with where you stand with them. To give an example, Humanist means you want to see the value and meaning in all lives as individuals instead of a few who would outrank others, while Machiavellian is more focused on your group and their survival alone, even if it comes at a cost to others. This is a refreshing approach to moral choices in an RPG setting but you’re not limited to one corner either, you can choose to approach all of them but this does come with the downside of taking the narrow-minded approach since it’ll also lock out of high-level decisions during conversations.

Similar to how your Moral Compass can change as you progress through Broken Roads, your class and its relevant skills can change too with each level up, though this depends on how you spend your attribute and skill points. You can very easily go from a gunner to a tinkerer or maybe a hybrid of the two with a few points in the right places, giving you tons of flexibility to adapt everything to your play style. However, Broken Roads has one more surprise up its sleeve, skill checks that take on a DND approach by rolling for success or failure similar to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader or Baldur’s Gate 3. Put the best of both games together and you’ll have Broken Roads.

Sadly, Broken Roads might have a massive world for you to explore, it’s not quite as big as it seems. You’ll mostly only have access to new areas as the story progresses and you’re pretty much stuck in those areas until something progresses further. Unfortunately, being limited to smaller areas instead of having an open world can put a damper on players who want to explore before progressing the story, but this does also make sense to maintain a steady story progression.

Now, life in Broken Roads would be dreadfully boring if there wasn’t some action. Granted, the type of action you get depends on what kind of trouble you can attract through your choices, and there are times where you really won’t be prepared at all. Combat in Broken Roads is pretty similar to releases like Jagged Alliance 3 to give a rough example, and whether you choose to go ranged or melee, you might find yourself on the unforgiving side of combat with how ‘janky’ the hit chance is. Aiming at an enemy will come with a percentile hit chance, but even at 80%, you’ll have more luck with explosives than wasting several turns only to miss on each attempt with anything else.

However, let’s say you do somehow manage to hit your target, you’ll also need to keep cover in mind because nobody in your party is immortal. Cover is your best friend if you want to reduce or break line of sight since it’ll also keep you alive for longer, but you’ll also need it to gain a tactical advantage or setup skill-based attacks. Naturally, you’ll also need to leverage cover for the support side of Broken Roads for those times when you need to heal up a party member in the middle of a fight. Unfortunately, healing is easier said than done because healing items are scarce and hellishly expensive to buy.

On the matter of buying and selling, it’s almost terrifying just how many ‘shops’ you’ll find in Broken Roads. However, keep in mind that this is a post-war land you’re dealing with and almost everybody you talk to will have something to sell and you can sell to them as well in a trade system. However, this will also have you talking to every stranger you can find in the hopes of getting that one specific item you need that’ll make the biggest difference to your current quest. However, if all else fails, looting is a great way to get what you need too and there’s definitely no shortage of loot to be found.

As well-built as Broken Roads seems to be, the quests you receive might not always make sense, and it becomes even more confusing when it comes to side quests. Unfortunately, while you do have a HUD, it only shows you one currently tracked quest. You’ll likely check the journal more often than not to switch to other quests and this can become a little tedious, even more so when you’re trying to do several quests at the same time. It’s nice that the quests reward you quite well with EXP, but there’s also the off chance that you might accidentally miss a side quest that could’ve made a good change to the story because of how easily they’re overlooked.

On the visual side of Broken Roads, there is definitely an interesting approach to the art style used with the characters and world design. The world and characters rely on a mix of realistic and low-resolution designs for a nice contrasting detail that also fits the world while emphasizing the current world state. However, cutscenes and more serious interactions rely on a hand-drawn storybook art style with narration thrown in. Combining these two very contrasting art styles does work well enough but it can also become a bit dull after a while with how tame everything starts to feel.

Broken Roads really shines when it comes to background music and voice acting. The soundtrack used in Broken Roads will typically shift depending on where you are or what’s currently happening but it’ll always suit the mood a little too perfectly, and nothing goes better with it than a little well-played voice acting to drive the point home. Unfortunately, not every conversation is voiced and we get it, it’s a huge release with a literal mountain of dialogue, but only having partially voiced conversations here and there kills the immersion at the worst of times.

Overall, Broken Roads is setting itself up to be a great RPG, between the story that’ll definitely draw you in and the Moral Compass, you’re in for quite a treat. The use of the classic DND style rolls for different actions is a nice touch and it plays well into the narrative-driven environment, all it needs now is a little combat balancing and it’ll be damned close to perfect. Unfortunately, the sporadic voice acting is a bit of a downer in this regard due to how big of a part it plays in the story, though this might be expecting too much from a new release and can be overlooked. 
 

Jay Claassen (@R3GR3T_3NVY)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed