Pirated it to give it a shot. Played for about 2 hours and I can say I'm thoroughly unimpressed and uninterested. Gameplay is split up into 3 segments.
I. Settlement management (Winter)
Start of the year is wintertime when you set up how many villagers will work what professions/jobs that need to be done around the settlement for the coming year. Very basic assignment and not much to it, you get an update on how they progressed at the end of winter when the next phase of the game comes into play during summer time. This plays like an extremely simplified version of the settlement management of King of Dragon's Pass, it doesn't have much depth and thus leads to complete apathy to the system. The rune sign is an indicator of how advanced this occupation is, you can spend resources like wood, tools, rope, seeds, etc. to upgrade these to increase efficiency (+5%) and increase the amount of workers this occupation can have as a maximum. The resources for these are mostly gathered by raiding or trade.
Settlement management at start of winter
After making your adjustments for the year it goes through winter where it skips through weeks/months to when interactable events take place. Usually 2-3 a winter. You pick a solution to the proposed problem and you get some text describing the consequences of your decision with resulting resources being gained or lost if applicable. For example offering livestock to the gods will reduce your food pool, sending people to hunt dangerous wildlife might reduce population if they get killed, etc.
One of the text events that will happen during winter time
Results of the assignment of labour in the beginning of winter with the modifiers of happiness and winter events
II. Sailing (Summer)
So after the amazing fun that was extremely basic settlement management you reap the fruits of your labours in the form of trading goods produced by the craftsmen and keeping everyone well fed with the various foodproduction methods. Load up the Danish longship with said goods, food for the hard days of rowing ahead, some repair tools, pick your heroes to accompany you and set sail for adventure! Except you don't really, you can't sail anywhere but quest locations, main- or sidequest. You'll be able to stop at settlements along the way if needed of your objective but your end goal must always be a quest location. At reaching your location you're not allowed to leave until you have solved your quest which then immediately ends that Summer section of the game and skips you home to the next winter. In the screenshot below you can see how travel from your homestead to the quest location Brema will always follow this route. It is not possible to plan a trading trip from Ulfarrsted to just Ambrum and return home for example.
The world map where you select your journey's destination. To the west there's Saxon England's eastern coast, Pictland, Friesia and finally Francia as Normandy and Bretagne. You can also sail up north to the end of Denmark
Preparations for sailing journeys include picking the heroes you'll bring along and the goods/supplies for trading and consuming on the coastal seas
Setting off in the longship at last you go through daily events similar to the ones you have during the settlement management for wintertime only now it's focused on events such as raiders trying to trick you into an ambush during foggy weather with horns, finding run aground ships, encountering easy pickings for some completely event based raiding (women, children, elderly), getting into stormy weather, etc. How you resolve these affect your resource pools of what you took along during the journey and the stats of your heroes who are also rowing. Each day of rowing reduces endurance and to recover any stat you'll have to find a friendly settlement to moor and rest in one of their halls. When a hero's stat pool goes below the annotated notch they'll start grumbling which results in losing morale which in turn affects their loyalty, this comes into play during combat later.
Sailing event where it's pretty obvious what you're supposed to do when faced with tides directing you into danger
Stopping at towns greats you to a scene similar to your own town. Depending on the size and purpose of the town/stop you'll have different options available to spend one day. This includes hunting for pelts & food, trading goods, resting heroes in one of the town's halls, feasting at the mead hall, healing heroes, buying weapons & armour from the local blacksmith or advancing quests. You can take several of these options on the same day. You have active tasks such as hunting, sleeping, etc. which you must assign a hero to and passive tasks such as trading which can be done at any time without assigning a hero. So in one day you could sell your tradegoods, buy some weapons from blacksmith, assign two heroes to hunt, one to sleep and the last one to feast. Sleeping, feasting and healing are to restore certain stats of the hero assigned that task.
Overview of the first town you'll visit in the game, to the north off-screen there is the option to hunt for food and pelts
When you have traded and rowed your way across to your destination you'll end up in some sort of camp or town again, wait around by doing actions and sleeping until the quest marker will pop up somewhere in town. Quests play like other events where you some descriptive text with your companions giving options or advice on how to proceed and you picking the desired outcome if a choice is offered. Of the few quests I did they all ended with fighting no matter what you picked so mileage may vary in how much choice you really have.
III. Combat
Which brings me to the absolute worst part of the game: Combat. The turn based combat is one of the most uninteresting and utterly boring battle systems I have played in the last couple of years. I didn't even mind the combat in Tides of Numenera, make of that what you will, but The Great Whale Road seems to have combat that is something you'd expect of a prototype or early alpha. There are no enticing systems at play here, no interesting manoeuvres or movements, no skills, no AoE, no nothing. All units have a non-aggressive and aggressive action per turn. The non-aggressive are moving 1 to 3 tiles (all units can move the same distance which is maximumly 3 tiles) or using a single taunt once. The aggressive action is either attacking a unit that is within range or activating a melee overwatch. The overwatch ability gives a singular free hit to the first enemy to enter the overwatch region of the character which is the reach of the weapon in all directions. Only one enemy will receive one hit, that's it. There is no area of control or attacks of opportunity for moving within reach of characters so you can run around as much as you want, though you can't run through an occupied tile. If you don't use your aggressive action you'll enter a Defensive Stance which gives 100% block chance as long as you have Defence Points (DP) left, shown as little shields above characters during combat, it will also regenerate your DP pool. Higher DP pools give higher chances of an attack not hitting if it is a slash attack or converting it to a pierce attack, losing only 1 DP and 1 HP instead of for example a 6 HP hit. Evasion gives the chance evading of an attack all together. When DP of a character runs out they can no longer enjoy 100% block chance during a Defence Stance and have no hit chance negation for the enemy.
Shown here is the range of Bera's "Cautious Move" taunt, her defence points (DP), her class, leadership role and her combat stats. The taunt uses warcy points which the party total of is shown in the upper left corner
Using the attack options gives several options on how to use your melee weapon be it blunt, piercing or slashing dependent on the weapon type the character is using. Pierce will always deal 1 HP damage and 1 DP damage per hit but at lowered accuracy. Blunt will deal 2 DP damage per hit. Slash is the all-rounder which has average chance of piercing or doing high HP damage. Realistically you'll be spamming blunt/pierce attacks until the enemy loses his DP and then spamming slashing attacks.
There's no advantage over attacking separate targets since there are no morale changes during combat and no opportunity to route enemies. Using an attack depending on the weapon type (which is the only thing the classes really do, assign weapon types and taunts) will give a certain amount of hits per attack, the expected damage per hit and the critical hit chance. Each hit gets rolled according to the hitchance in a damage roulette somewhat similar to certain WH:40K boardgames.
Damage roulette of a 2 hit axe-hammer. Both attacks were hits, first hit was a Pierce for 1 HP and 1 DP damage; second hit a Slash for 2 HP damage.
Melee weapons have ranges of 1 or 2 tiles, 2 tile weapons can reach over enemies and friendlies. Ranged weapons I didn't get access to but it seems about 5-6 tiles when used against me, they have very low damage mostly 1 HP when actually hitting. Line fighting is only there in the aspect of having higher reach weapons since no actual defensive lines can be formed with the unlimited movement during combat.
All this leads to utterly uninspired combat encounters which are always on flat planes with the exact same battle grid layout. The only variation I have encounterd during my 2 hours being the occasional small campfire blocking the middle of the battlefield for a couple of tiles, this could have created a two pronged attack scenario if only manoeuvring was relevant. Some interesting or animated visuals might have distracted you from the soulless monotony but the only animations you'll be getting is a swipe graphic for attacks, a shield popping up for defensive stance, some blood spilling, the damage roulette and upon character death the figurine turning into a broken shield & sword which falls to the ground. These are the only animations in the battle scenes I can remember seeing. The backgrounds don't do much better with it either being a generic town or forest scene. Clicking on your men and giving orders isn't even a smooth experience in that clicking on anything might not register in the game at all. Selecting units might take 4-5 clicks at times, and this was no gamelag or hanging it just refused to register the click, to select or move units. Since all selection boxes are available at all times it'll be more than once per encounter where you'll be accidentally clicking on a friendly character, who ever minutely overlapped with your actual target, leading to cancellation of your order having to redo the several clicks.
IV. The rest
The story so far is a very gripping "Your Jarl was betrayed and murdered by Saxons, are you a bad enough dude to avenge him!?" I have nothing more to say about this really. Sidequests seem to mainly revolve around revenge either by your hero companions, yourself or others who want to exact their revenge on your clan. Combat and violent means is what rules the day here. They'll throw any old excuse at you to force you back into the droning combat cycle once more.
The music ranges from acceptable to very forgetful. Especially the music played during combat only deepens the sorrow you'll feel being stuck in this endless loop for one more encounter. Also some loading times are easily 20 seconds on my HDD which is quite a while for some mediocre static 2D art.
This had some good ideas but they completely fucked the execution of every part. The settlement stuff is too simple, the sailing too restrictive which in turn makes the settlement even less impactful, and the combat so bare bones that no one would be entertained by this for longer than half an hour. It's a prototype released as a fully fledged game and it shows.
This ended up taking a lot longer to write than I expected it to.