Broken age act 2 review full#
Broken age act 2 review trial#
Broken age act 2 review Pc#

Broken age act 2 review Pc#

The higher-than-expected funding caused the scope of Broken Age to balloon massively going from a tiny iOS game to a full-on PC and console release starring Elijah Wood and featuring music from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Back in February 2012, game developer Double Fine took a gamble and asked for the then-unheard-of sum of $400,000 via Kickstarter to make a small-scale point-and-click adventure game, something that the company's fans had long begged for but that it felt was financially impossible to fund through traditional means. We've been waiting a long time for this day. It’s no modern classic though, so enjoy the ride while it lasts.Broken Age resurrects all of the key features of classic 1990's adventure games: Gorgeous artwork, a fascinating storyline, funny writing, and puzzles that don't make any freaking sense. As a nostalgia trip, a casual adventure, and a world to explore, it’s pleasant and very pretty company. Ultimately, it’s a game that cries out for a Director’s Cut, to be a comfortable six or so hours instead of a forced eight-to-ten. The bulk is still amusing, charming and enjoyable, and the faults in this second half would be much less notable as part of a whole-in much the same way that nobody really brings up how bad much of the second half of Grim Fandango and Monkey Island 2 were. Seen in its entirety though, that’s not necessarily the dire problem it might sound. While much of Broken Age is fun, it’s not a particularly great capital-a Adventure. It just hammers home that while much of Broken Age is fun, it’s not a particularly great capital-a Adventure. Rather than giving Shay and Vella a walkie-talkie or something with which they might actually spark the relationship the game somewhat casually assumes they have despite them barely having met, it also opts for a real bugbear of mine-characters solving puzzles by using information they couldn’t actually know, like Vella being asked the name of Shay’s favourite toy.

We do finally get some where the two worlds interconnect, but only to a point.

Broken age act 2 review trial#

Far too many mistake time-wasting for difficulty, with endless traipsing back and forth, dealing with needlessly obstructive characters or mechanics (particularly in the final puzzle, which is tooth-grinding in its over-deliberate fussiness), and developing an obsession with rewiring robots through the most tedious trial and error.

Puzzles in particular aren’t a high point in the first half, but are largely forgettable. All of that gets chucked aside in the second chapter, which answers the big questions early on and then has little to replace them except shopping lists for both characters. Despite their simplicity, there was a cleverness in their design-little touches to watch out for, and a shared theme of growing up and finding your own path.

The first part of Broken Age was in every way a comfortable rather than revolutionary experience, but an interesting one that offered two intriguing, isolated character stories-Vella, a young woman who decides she’d rather not be fed to local Cthuloid horror Mog Chothra, and Shay, a young man on a nurserypunk spaceship looking for a real adventure. In another world, I might be whining “Wait, this is it?” after zipping through. That may or may not be true, and if it is, I do understand.

Broken age act 2 review full#

In practice, being split into episodes hasn’t been to its favour, both in terms of how over-familiar its world feels despite our limited exposure to it, and how bloated this new instalment feels-like a third of the game has been forcibly over-inflated to be a full half to justify the time taken, rather than simply presented as originally intended. Broken Age wants to be one adventure game, simply rolling along from start to finish as if the last year never happened. I say ‘Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’, but it’s not quite that simple.