Broken Roads review: Bogan’s Gate

Welcome to post-apocalyptic Australia, c***sucker.

Honestly, of all the places you could be stuck after the bombs drop, the Aussie Outback has got to be one of the worst. This big old island that I call home is, apparently, the “oldest, flattest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils”. Now, imagine what it would be like fresh off the back of the nuclear winter that no doubt followed… and that’s where you’ll find yourself in Broken Roads.

As you can probably imagine, rural Australia is a pretty hard place to survive at the best of times. It’s dry. It’s hot. There are plenty of animals out there that would happily make your day a whole lot worse. Set in far flung Western Australia, and featuring plenty of real-life locations, Broken Roads plonks you deep into the Outback after 80% of the country’s population has bit the dust.

If you’ve played the OG Fallouts, Wasteland or even Baldur’s Gate, then you’ll be immediately familiar with what is on offer here. Turn-based combat, dialogue options aplenty, and consequential choices at every turn make it easy to see where inspiration has been drawn from.

I love a sunburnt country…

In many ways though, Broken Roads feels as much like a love letter to Australia as it is to the old school RPG. The Australiana within is turned all the way up to 11 in ways that are sure to confuse gamers who don’t hail from our sunburnt island. From classic Aussie slang through to yeasty spread sandwiches and some trademark-infringement-avoidant beers, it’s clear that the devs have put a great deal of care in presenting this end times Australia to the world. There’s even an entire in-game translation tool complete with encyclopaedia available to help those less familiar with our -isms to understand.

This love of country extends deeply into the game’s art style too – a truly beautiful, hand drawn aesthetic that captures the rugged beauty of the Outback. While I may not be from rural Western Australia, I am from a tiny country town nestled in Victoria’s wheatbelt. To say that the backgrounds and vistas you encounter in game are representative of the Outback is selling the artists short. It doesn’t just look like the Outback, it FEELS like it too.

Stunningly drawn vistas work in tandem with excellent sound design to recreate the experience of being there, under the baking sun. Sound and art work together and coalesce into an almost dreamlike state that’s as vivid as any of my memories from time spent out in the bush. More than once the wave of nostalgia washed over me while exploring, and has even left this writer feeling a twang of rose-coloured homesickness at times too. Truly, kudos to those teams at Drop Bear Bytes.

Croc Dundee or Mick Taylor?

When it comes to your player character, there are four options, called origins, in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. On offer is your choice of the Surveyor, Barter Crew, Jackaroo, and Hired Gun. These origins each provide you with some prebaked stats and some special dialogue options down the track, but you don’t have to stick to strictly to what you chose at the start.

Unlike many other RPGs, Broken Roads has ditched the class system entirely and leaves you to craft a character exactly as you see fit. Want some more Intelligence for some extra AP? Invest! How about a bit of gun skill to go with your silver tongue? As easy as gaining a level. This does of course mean that you could unintentionally make a truly awful character, and that some of the skills and abilities are hidden deep within walls of text, but most will enjoy this level of customization.

The next step in creating your vault dweller desert ranger player character is plotting your Moral Compass – a very literal representation of your character’s world view. In game, the compass is divided into four quadrants that impact just what dialogue choices will be available to you. Will you be a Utilitarian or a Humanist? A Nihilist? Or perhaps you’re leaning a little more Machiavellian. The initial choices you make when creating your character provide your baseline, but each dialogue option your choose will swing your compass further one way or the other.

In practice, many of the Humanist and Utilitarian choices end up being quite similar, while the Machiavellian ones often ended up being the most hilarious. The more you opt for dialogue from a particular quadrant, the deeper into it you’ll go, eventually even unlocking Traits that provide their own combat bonuses or passive effects.

Curiosity killed the cast

Something I really struggled heavily with, unfortunately, was forming any kind of connection to the characters in the story. Too often it felt like they all hated anything I did, and conversations with them were mostly short and sharp. This ultimately led to me caring very little about any of them – a situation only made worse by the game’s penchant for punishing compulsive clickers like myself.

You see, dear reader, if I come across a dialogue option, I simply must click it. I have to know what tasty morsels of worldbuilding are hidden behind each and every choice in a dialogue tree – but this is something harshly punished in Broken Roads. Some characters may get fed up with you “pestering” them when you’re just clicking through the choices. Other options may unintentionally lead to the death of someone, forever changing your story path.

It’s heavily stressed several times that sometimes the best option is to simply say nothing at all, but I challenge the notion that this makes for fun or enjoyable gameplay. If I wanted to play a silent protagonist, I’d play Doom or Half-Life. I gravitate toward RPGs like Broken Roads to be engaged in a world, immerse myself in it and steer my way through it – and not to resign myself to a quiet onlooker while the story happens around me.

I get why, as a game design device, the devs made this choice. However, when options are this punishing it simply drains my enjoyment of the game. If I’m forced to save scum at every chance for dialogue, then what’s the point of playing at all? It’s a real shame too, because there’s some excellent, human story in that discourse, but the game design simply sets that up to be hidden.

Life goes on

In many ways, Broken Roads is a showcase of the indomitable human spirit. It’s chock full of cobbers who are just doing their best to get by in the wasteland, and it’s hard to hold it against those among them who go full Mad Max in the wake of a nuclear Armageddon. Sure, you may not agree with the morality of someone nicking water from the local dewy, but what if it was a bunch of kids just trying to get by?

Ultimately, I think there’s too much here to fully judge the game off one playthrough. Those who dive headlong into this somewhat niche presentation of Australiana are sure to find joy amongst the rough. For gamers like me, boring min-maxers who like to “get it right” the first time, things can be a bit harder – but there’s still plenty here to love.

In the end, it’s best to look at Broken Roads as the answer to “What if Fallout but Australia?” Fans of any CRPG will immediately recognise a lot of what Broken Roads is going for, and those with more old school tastes will feel right at home nestled deep in the West Australian outback.

Broken Roads was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC via Steam, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.