The Banner Saga - Preview @ Gaming Illustrated

Gaming Illustrated has a new preview for The Banner Saga saying the game brings  beauty to Strategy RPG's.

In The Banner Saga, players will enjoy a mature story that heavily emphasizes decisions and choice. As a result, players’ choices may result in losses and Stoic Studio wants players to accept their decisions and losses as part of the story. In the demo, players meet Alette and her father, who must deal with the sudden reemergence of an ancient evil. Through their journey, they have to make decisions about tracking down supplies, which means to gain the supplies they have to fight these evil creatures or avoid the fight and supplies and possibly not have enough supplies for the rest of their journey. As with their BioWare lineage, The Banner Saga puts a heavy emphasis on choice through dialogue, which in the demo resulted in hard decisions that put members of the caravan in direct danger. This did lead to death occasionally. It is all part of the experience of this Viking caravan, sometimes people die, but you have to continue on because there is nothing else to do, but persevere.

This is one of the best times to be a tactical/strategy RPG fan with so many recent great titles in the genre (Fire Emblem: Awakenings, Skulls of the Shogun and XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the upcoming Enemy Within and Klei’s Incognita, and Brad Muir’s Massive Chalice next year). The Banner Saga looks to continue the trend of exciting, challenging and engrossing strategy games. If anything, it is going to offer an aesthetically pleasing tactical experience.