4/5 ★ – nate_mckeever's review of The Banner Saga.

Oregan Trail meets XCOM set in an apocalyptic Viking-esque world. It’s pretty rad. The art is drop dead gorgeous. The hand drawn animations and character models are amazing. And the scenery is epic. It’s just beautiful. The gameplay falls into two distinct columns: - 1. Decision making for your caravan(s) that can really make or break the playthrough. And sometimes even your best choices have far reaching consequences that can make things more difficult down the road. Pragmatism vs. Morslity can really be put to the test here. There’s also balancing morale and making sure that you have enough supplies- which can affect your fighters. - 2. The grid based, turn based combat… On normal difficulty it’s an absolute beast. Which really does an incredible job of stressing you out sometimes, lol. Full disclosure I dropped the difficulty towards the end because frankly it was just getting to be too much. But I still love it. Lol. The tl;dr- I loved my replay and this game is a very strong should play in my book. But it will wreck you if you don’t take it seriously. Not for everyone, but if you can hang with it, it’s something special.