You recruit additional fighters at the aptly named training tent, where characters also partake in challenges to earn renown ‒ like using your mage to chain lightning between three targets ‒ or spar with your caravan’s B-team and supplement their kills. You won’t injure your comrades, but without the appropriate experience, you cannot promote (level up) units.
Renown pays for the character promotions. The game’s primary currency, you gain renown for every non-practice kill, challenge beaten, or achieving something praiseworthy during dialogue. And yet you must distribute it between your champions and camp life. Renown enables you to purchase supplies, accessories, and those aforementioned promotions. Role-play a paragon or renegade until you sprout wings or horns, you’ll never amass enough acclaim to go around.
Limiting renown to battles that matter borders on spiteful. My ever-dwindling renown left me a handful of weak heroes in The Banner Saga, but at least it thwarts players that would grind out ranks and obliterate brigands in a couple turns.
The Banner Saga settled into a comfortable pattern, herding players from one altercation to the next. The Banner Saga 2, however, mixes a variety of objectives into confrontations. You may need to protect an important monarch or clear away an avalanche as dredge encroach on your position. Strong soldiers win battles; the smart ones come home from war.
And for anyone unfamiliar with combat, you and your foes exchange turns, one hero at a time, brandishing swords and bows. An ally character moves and attacks, an adversary moves and attacks. Varl take up four tiles on the grid, humans only need one. When enemy reinforcements dwarfed my six survivors, I devised choke points, throttling the opposition. The horseborn also occupy one square, though they gain an extra move after their attacks, allowing them to initiate hit-and-run tactics. Horseborn inflict damage akin to a horned giant, too; I almost lined my roster with them entirely.
Overpowered as some characters may be, The Banner Saga 2 left well alone when it came to damage calculation. Each fighter possesses a strength and armor value. Strength works as an indicator of someone’s health and how hard he or she hits. Eight strength limits that person to eight damage, unless you buff an attack with willpower.
Characters start a brawl with set measures of willpower ‒ possibly more depending on caravan morale ‒ though it replenishes every time you procure a kill. Armor, by comparison, neutralizes damage through ordinary subtraction. Matching someone with seven strength against a unit with three armor will deal four points of pain.
That’s not even accounting for abilities that consume willpower. Stoic upped the level cap to ten, and as characters grow, they unlock another special ability of your choosing. Rook’s friend Iver learned a skill that would swing his axe in a whirlwind; the more willpower I pumped into it, the more adjacent assailants I struck.
Willpower is not to be squandered, either. Combat presents difficult choices of its own, as the dredge manifest stats more than twice yours. Do you focus fire on a colossus, weakening the armor so a varl can deal death with one hew? Or would you keep feebler invaders alive with a point or two of strength? They’ll soak up a turn until killed, and at most they’ll bruise someone’s breastplate in futility.
Like a true sequel, more enemies lay into you per battle, and new types ‒ such as insects that become invisible before striking ‒ shake up seasoned strategies. Of course, players have fresh classes to call on as well. The poet amplifies an ally’s strength when assailing beefier foes, and again, the training tent helps people get a feel for those intriguing abilities without sacrificing the user in a feud.
Seeing my clans clash makes me wish I could rotate the camera. To likely reduce the hassle of drawing the world in three dimensions, combat operates at a fixed angle, which leads to errant misclicks when you can’t afford them.
In The Banner Saga, battlefields were light on detail, too. Snow and ice here, ruins there. Stoic stepped up its game for The Banner Saga 2. In many skirmishes, your bannermen, clad in their earthy hues and haphazard tunics, look on in awe. Seeing the crowd at my back solidified the sense that my six fighters were not the only ones that matter. You have dozens of lives riding on your victories.
The loving attention to detail extends to the rest of The Banner Saga 2. An excellent soundtrack composed by Austin Wintory reflects the narrative’s touchstones of sacrifice and perseverance. Trumpets blare their shaken fanfares, conveying heroism under stress. The drums sound out in unison during a frantic march, urging you forward regardless of the heartache.
And I’m okay with The Banner Saga 2 not dwelling on ghastly images – faces ornamented by arrows, men with more intestines on the outside than in, those types of nightmares. I’ll soak in pictures of saccharine forests, castles that overshadow refugee tents outside their walls, or the animations that seem ripped from a 1960s Disney classic. The map shares those compliments and then some. Framed like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Stoic introduces lore when you mouse over the various villages, mountains, and waterways. To read every snippet would cost an evening.
The Banner Saga 2 elicits regret, as I lack the proper vocabulary to describe such unparalleled visuals. I can tell you that blues and greens suggest a soothing tone while reds and yellows arouse passion. Purple tones represent royalty, and an image’s opacity denotes how far off objects seem. Correct me if I’m wrong, I still resent (in the good way) anyone responsible for bringing The Banner Saga 2’s art to life. Talent like that is hard to come by.
So, too, are releases like The Banner Saga 2 – rendered with care – tough to find. The combat, which changed very little in the two years the franchise has been dormant, was my rock in this frozen hell. Although I owned up to my failures as a commander during conversations and fatal outcomes, I could bring friends and family members home when swords began to fall.
The Banner Saga 2 plays its cards well, pushing the boundaries of a person’s leadership. The writing does not vilify fans for abandoning women and children, nor does it worship heroics. No “so-and-so will remember that” dances into view, and there The Banner Saga 2 excels. Apply logical reasoning and trust your instincts. The Banner Saga 2’s growth sounds incremental, not monumental, but as the sequel to my 2014 game of the year, that still leaves a lot to love.
This review is based on the PC version, which we were provided.
