Broken Age: The Complete Adventure

It was supposed to be an old school point and click and that's that it is. It has funny humour, fine and quirky characters and tedious gameplay with crappy puzzles. While the good parts (humour and quirkiness) are more prevalent in the first half, the tediousness looms over the 2nd half unfortunately. The 2nd half is exactly what everyone hated about the old-school point and clicks: the retarded puzzle logic which you can't finish without a walkthrough or tediously trying everything on everything, over and over again. The robot rewiring is exactly the kind of thing I hated about the old adventures. So basically: Meh. If the whole game was like the first part, it would be worth those 5 € or so I paid for it in the sale, but such as it is there are tons of much better games. For the original price it's a total ripoff.

First let's start with the pros. This game looks beautiful. It looks like a storybook and it's also drawn in the Psychonauts style which looks very good. The game has great voice acting with actors like Jack Black and Elijah Wood. And finally the music sounds very nice and fit perfectly with the game. Now the cons. The game is very simple for an point-and-click adventure. Theirs is lack of options for how you deal with people and objects. In older point-and-click adventure games you would have options to look, interact, or take most objects but in the game all you can do is click on objects and if the character can take the object he/she will if they can't they will comment on it. It also got the lazy game mechanic where items disappear when it is used to solve a puzzle. The interaction between the player characters and NPCs are also very limited and when you solve their puzzle you can't even talk with them anymore. And talking about puzzles the puzzles of act 1 was OK but the puzzles for act 2 was terrible. The knot puzzle was by far the worse and their is little to no clue of how to solve it on your own. They also added dual puzzles for act 2 which makes no sense. For example to repair Shay's robot you will need Vella to see some symbols but that makes no sense as Shay and Vella have no way of communicating with each other. So Shay is just guessing the solution. But the biggest failure of this game is the story. For a point-and-click adventure game story is the most important feature. Act 1 started off with with many interesting plot threads but they either became plot-holes or has very little payoff in act 2. The ending for Broken Age is one of the most disappointing endings that I have ever encountered. Most of the important plot threads like dealing with the true villain are all done off screen! This game feels very incomplete which is sad as I thought that $3,336,371 and 3 years of development would be enough to make great game but I was wrong.

Many good things about it. It starts out well and I enjoyed much of the game. It just failed in even more ways. There is this strange mix of trying to tell a story and then throwing in all kinds of woopaloooooo bolappppaaapppppoooooooo madness. They made a great job with the design, music and voice acting, but it doesn't set any atmosphere. There is no atmosphere to talk about. Everything is completely unbelievable, not in the sense that I don't believe in magic or whatever, but the game breaks it's own rules and fails completely at being coherent. The world is never immersive. It feels like it's the product of some randomizer which has just stringed some random events and characters together without any thought. Most of the game feels out of place. The second half has the story fall apart completely. Haven't seen such a mess in a long time. The game takes an overall turn for the worse with the second chapter but most of all with the story. Monotonous and lots of walking back and forth. Good parts: The space ship story starts out good. Some puzzles and areas are really good and well designed. Overall very much attention to detail. For example, if you try using an item somewhere it can't be used you won't just hear " I can't do that". Usually you get a specific line or even conversation custom made for that only situation. I haven't encountered any other P&C game with that much attention to detail. At best a very weak 3/5 but I would stay away from this game.

Childish and very average. Also, way too easy. Looks great though!

I waited for the game to be completed by its second act before playing though it, so I went in well aware that it wasn't an old-school adventure game, and all of the other complaints people had about it. Still, I have to say that I enjoyed the first act quite a bit, though the pacing really dragged during certain parts (most notably Shay's sections). The humor more than made up for this, however. The second act, on the other hand, is an abomination. The puzzles are tedious and repetitive (expect to do A LOT of wiring and rewiring) when they're not outright stupid (you have to put yourself in danger and ignore all the hints for how to get out of the situation in order to progress—unbelievably, this is mandatory). Even the story, which was charming and unique in the first act, goes absolutely nowhere. You learn one or two new things, then spend the rest of the second act completing puzzles that require switching back and forth between characters where before this was never necessary. None of it ever leads anywhere; the game ends with a whimper instead of a large-scale and interesting event like the first act's ending, never bothering to be that charming or interesting again. In fact, by the time the credits roll, you're bound to find yourself wondering if there's an extra scene after the credits to give you some actual closure (there isn't). You even spend most of the second act wandering through the same areas you spent the first act in, and though it's nice to see the effects of some of the things you did, some new areas would have been hugely appreciated. The whole thing is just kind of phoned-in. The only reason I'm giving it three stars is because of the graphics, humor, and voice acting, all of which are top-notch throughout. Outside of that, everything else is either forgettable or outright embarrassing.