The Banner Saga is a planned episodic game with beautiful hand-drawn artwork. The game is heavily story-driven with a nice smattering of choice & consequence and turn based combat.
Although the story is fairly linear, which characters remain alive at the game's conclusion depends greatly on player choices throughout. The Banner Saga is built on the concept of an apocalypse, and the developers had no problems presenting the harsh choices that such an event would entail. The game gives a good framework of events and then allows the player to tailor how their individual journey plays out. Major plot points will be the same, but the pieces that will fill in the blanks will be customized and are often memorable. The map is also crammed full of lore information for people who really want to dig into the world without it being imposed on players who don’t.
The story is told from the perspective of two different groups who start at opposite ends of the country. The point of view jumps between these two groups, and some people complain about issues following the plot, but if you can follow Game of Thrones this shouldn't be an issue. Because the world is ending supplies are limited and required to prevent your caravan from starving, NPCs from leaving, morale plummeting, and battles becoming more difficult as a result. You can buy supplies with renown, gained from battles, but it is also needed to upgrade troops or buy items. You will not be swimming in renown, or supplies, so careful management of resources can make a big difference.
The combat is turn-based, and there's a variety of classes with specialized skills creating opportunities for a variety of tactics. You can also move character's stat points around between 6 different attributes allowing for true customization of roles and play-style. For example, you can move points into a unit to make them a specialized armor breaker or boost the number of times they can sprint/use their special ability. One of the attributes units have is called Will Power which dictates a unit's ability to go above and beyond their typical limits. These points can be spent on moving further than normal, or to boost an attack, and do not naturally refill. As you kill units, you begin to fill up your war horn. These charges can be expended to refill a unit’s Will Power and can provide the boost needed to push through a tough encounter. Exertion determines how much Will Power a unit can use in one turn preventing a large one time boost unless a unit is specifically built to fufill that role.
The unique mechanic that separates The Banner Saga's combat from other games is the shared health/strength pool on units. Damaging an enemy reduces the damage they can do to you. However, outright killing a unit might not be in your best interest because the game uses an "I go, you go system" allowing for full strength units to act more quickly. Therefore, it can be valuable to leave heavily damaged units, who do little damage, alive to prevent full strength units from getting more turns and quickly turning the tables against your army. All units also have an armor value which reduces incoming damage, as well as chance to be hit, so sometimes it's better to knock this down before attempting to damage a unit. The only drawback of the combat system is the limited number of enemy types, many of which lack special abilities, which does erode the tactical depth from the AI a bit. Each member of your party can equip an item that will also influence approaches to battle. The size difference between the jarls and humans is also clearly evident in combat with the giants taking up sections of 2x2, making them useful for blocking approaches for enemies, especially larger ones.
Despite these minor complaints, I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the base mechanics are in place and work fine. If the remaining episodes continue the dark, but engrossing, story and Stoic builds on the foundations of the combat system, then this series could easily turn into an epic masterpiece fans of story driven games won't want to miss.