-- DISCLAIMER: I was provided with the code for Banner Saga 3 on Switch for this review -Banner Saga 3, the latest and final chapter in the turn-based strategy game series by Stoic Studios, continues the story established in the first two games; with humanity, the Varl and the Horseborn (Centaurs!) cooped up within the last bastion of Arberrang. Further north from that city, within a world changed by a blighted darkness, Eyvind, Juno and Iver seek a way to reverse the destruction wrought by the darkness.
The combat system is just as good as the last two games, with its utterly unique way of illustrating health and survivability. To simplify it for this review, the strength of your hits is tied directly to how much health you have, which is protected by your armour rating. This adds an edge of tension to every battle because when you lose health, your attacks don’t do as much. And usually, your enemies are very willing to take advantage of that.
Like the first two games, Banner Saga 3 throws you into situations where you must make difficult decisions to ensure the survival of your people. Each decision has weight and the consequences resound throughout the game through the clever use of resources. Decide to accept people into your group? Here’s 50 fighters and 70 clansmen. Meaning more power in narrative events but more food needing to be used to feed them.
Stoic have added a wave system to some of the battles, with a reward at the end that usually justifies the knuckle-biting of fighting off all the waves, but luckily, in easy mode at least, you can fight the first wave and then bail. Useful if you’re worried about keeping your people alive.
The game works well by having its characters be fully realised people with motivations and flaws that play off each other, and throughout the narrative, you’ll find yourself trusting different people for different reasons. It’s incredibly well done. Throughout my time with Banner Saga 3, I felt a certain amount of trepidation and dread about what would happen to the people in the game no matter the decisions I made. It’s a testament to just how good the characterisation and writing are that I kept feeling this until the very last moment of the game. As I played it on the Switch I’ll talk a little about my experience with that. I originally started playing in handheld mode and noticed that sometimes the dialogue in travel scenes was askew enough as to be offscreen with no way to scroll over to read it. Weirdly enough, going to TV mode fixed this, and it turned out the
dialogue in those scenes isn’t of the highest importance, so it wasn’t a huge deal. I didn’t notice any other glitches or gaffs while playing and for such an involved game the handheld mode worked incredibly well. If you’ve ever had a hankering for a turn-based strategy game set during the apocalypse of a Viking influenced fantasy world than the Banner Saga series is for you, and the Banner Saga 3 is a remarkably fitting ending to that setting and story. I’m giving the Banner Saga 3 a 4 out of 5. It’s a phenomenally good game with a nail-biting story and a combat system custom built to ratchet up the tension. It’s also hard as nails and firmly entrenched in turn-based strategy ways, so it might not be for everyone.
By Shaun Stoddard