The Banner Saga 2 Review
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Characters also get to wear a single piece of equipment. These items have level restrictions, where -- just like you'd guess - the higher the item's level, the more powerful it is. Items can improve attributes or talents, give resistances, add or remove aggro, and more, so they're just as important as every other part of a character's development, and they mean you have to hold some renown points back just in case you find something good for sale.
Finally, The Banner Saga 2 includes some new things for characters over the original game. When characters reach level 6, they gain access to a new active ability, which gives them more options in combat. Unfortunately, these abilities are almost all recycled from other classes (and the original game), so they're not as exciting as they might be. Stoic Studio also added in some new classes and character types, including poets, spear-toting kragsmen, and centaur-like horseborn. Poets might be the most interesting because they're utility characters. They can do useful things like add willpower to your party when they're close enough to a character who makes a kill, but they don't add much in the way of offense themselves.
Campaign
The campaign in The Banner Saga 2 works much like the campaign from The Banner Saga. That is, you manage your group of survivors, making sure everybody stays in good spirits and has enough to eat; you fight enemies (mostly) when they attack you and you don't have any choice; and you make decisions, sometimes important and sometimes not, during numerous story-related events. I'll cover each of these areas in turn.
Managing your survivors is much easier in The Banner Saga 2 than it was in the original game. In both games, you have clansmen, fighters and varl under your banner, but while in The Banner Saga clansmen didn't do anything (other than eat your food), in The Banner Saga 2 they scavenge for supplies and keep your people fed. Also, while in The Banner Saga you fought many "war battles" against the dredge, which required having as many fighters and varl as possible, these battles are much rarer in The Banner Saga 2.
As a result, while you're allowed to convert your clansmen into fighters, this is almost never necessary, and because you can leave most of your people as clansmen, they're able to keep you flush with supplies. An abundance of supplies means you can spend your renown elsewhere, and it also means you can rest as often as you want, which keeps the morale of your people high. I had all sorts of trouble managing food and morale the first time I played The Banner Saga, but it was a complete non-issue in The Banner Saga 2.
Luckily, The Banner Saga 2's combat engine remains just as exciting as ever -- mostly because it didn't change much from the first game. When combat starts up, you have to pick up to six characters from your party to fight the battle. Your team of characters then alternates turns with the enemy, regardless of how many characters each side has. This lasts until one side or the other only has one character left, and then the game switches to "pillage mode," where all characters get one turn per round.
On each turn, a character is allowed to move and then attack or use an ability -- except for the new horseborn characters, who can move, attack, and then move again. Because of the alternating turns, you're better off leaving an enemy in a weakened state rather than killing it (so it uses up a turn but can't do much with it), and it's better to deal with a strong opponent first rather than last. That is, The Banner Saga 2 reverses a lot of the strategies that usually work in turn-based games, which makes it fun and intriguing to play.
Because of all of the characters and abilities available to you, you have lots of ways to deal with enemies. Just as one example, I tended to use a character named Egil who had the Stone Wall ability. He'd start out each battle by rushing over to the enemies and activating his skill (which allows him to resist damage), and because he also wore a +2 aggro item, enemies would waste their attacks on him while the rest of my party pelted them with ranged attacks. This ended up being a fairly "safe" strategy, because my characters didn't take much damage and thus rarely found themselves in any trouble.
If you use a less safe strategy, or if you just fight more aggressively, then your characters might take so much damage that they get knocked out. This leaves them with an injury, which takes a day or more of resting to heal. Since resting is also useful for increasing morale, you're likely to do it every so often anyway, which means a few mistakes here and there don't really cost you anything.
For winning a battle, you earn some renown, which you can use to advance the level of your characters. Characters can gain levels once they've killed enough enemies, so it's a good idea to spread the wealth around, and to make sure your defensive characters get a few kills, too, rather than having one high-damage "killer" character who does everything.
Stoic Studio also added a few new tweaks to combat. Previously, you could only use training tents to practice with different groups of characters and to test out abilities. But now the tents include challenges, where you have to use certain abilities in certain ways, and you win renown for beating them. Battle maps include obstacles, which have a few hit points and can protect your archers from damage -- for a round or two anyway. Characters have many more ways to score critical hits (via abilities and equipment), to the point where you can create critical hit builds. And unlike the first game, many of the battles in The Banner Saga 2 include special rules or winning conditions, so they're not all the same. A few examples include surviving while waves of enemies attack you, defeating a particular enemy to win the battle, and saving a particular enemy for last so you can capture it. The variety to the battles helps to keep them interesting.
