The Great Whale Road Preview
The Great Whale Road is currently in Early Access on Steam and it shows; it clearly has a long way to go. GWR prides itself in being unique by incorporating a number of gameplay styles into one package wrapped with a Viking-era style story. Unfortunately, none of the gameplay styles feel very refined and the story is blander than plain yogurt. And I hate yogurt.
The Great Whale Road takes place during the time of the Vikings, and at the beginning of the game you’re given a choice of which race you would like to play as. In this version, you can only select the Danes, however there were two additional races listed as “coming soon”. Afterward, I was given some backstory about, well… I’m not quite sure. I’ve played through the first couple years in this game twice and I still don’t get what the point is. Part of this issue is in the presentation; you’re bombarded with text box after text box of poorly written story – it’s just not a good way to convey a story.
GWR presents itself through yearly cycles; you begin in the Fall “management” phase, survive the Winter phase, then experience the story missions in the Spring/Summer phases. At the beginning of the game, you start in a small village where you’re presented with a choice of two leaders. For each leader, you’re presented with a brief description, but like most of the questions you’ll be presented in this game, not enough information is provided to make anything more than a guess. From there, you’re required to assign points to seven different categories. These stats will affect things such as how much food your village grows or how strong your fighters are.
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“The Great Whale Road has a great concept; turn-based battles, trade resources in towns, a Viking era story, but fails to execute on any of these concepts all that well.”
When you enter the Winter phase of the game where you’re given a series of multiple-choice questions, and your answer will impact your resources (such as food or population). Moving to Summer, you take four different warriors and begin sailing to a predetermined destination. Sailing is 100% automated, and during this phase, you’ll again encounter multiple-choice questions that will impact certain resources or, in some cases, begin a battle with enemies. For some reason, the developers figured sleeping on a boat is bad and penalizes players for not finding a place to dock each night. This forces the whole sailing experience to drag on even longer. During one year, I was forced to sail for over 20 minutes (real time) – needless to say, GWR needs to find a far better way to travel, because as it stands now, it’s awful. At some point, you’ll reach your destination, usually another generic village and you’ll be given more multiple choice questions to push the story forward.
The battles, probably the best part of the game are reminiscent of games like Fire Emblem. You’re given cards that can buff your character or add additional warriors (to a maximum of four, which is frustrating since the enemies don’t seem to have a limit). Your only goal is to kill the enemy leader, and you’ll lose if your leader dies. The game’s AI during battles is challenging enough, I never felt like it was “cheap”.
The Great Whale Road doesn’t offer anything beyond the story, and with the addition of two more races to play as in the future, the amount of single player content may end up being pretty significant. My concern is the level of quality these additional storylines will have. The current story is dull and poorly written and I would hope they put more effort into improving this aspect before expanding the game to three storylines. Additionally, it is unlikely there will be a multiplayer component, even though the battles could be conducent with some form of online or local play.
The games visuals are poorly constructed with text oftentimes hardly legible, using a small font that’s hard on the eyes. The characters are just still images, with no animation at all and villages are lifeless and generic with only slight deviations. The only minor highlight was the sailing sequence, as it is animated and the water effect does look nice – if it’s a sign of how the entire game will look once finished, then visually this game could be salvaged.
The Great Whale Road has a great concept; turn-based battles, trade resources in towns, a Viking era story, but fails to execute on any of these concepts all that well. The game is in Early Access, so it’s possible there will be many improvements made before the final release but at this point, it seems like Sunburned has a long way to go.
*** PC code provided by the publisher ***
