I played for about twenty hours and the game seemed impressive and unbelievably addictive. Your party gets some skills and become more and more experienced, you explore new lands, find and buy new gear and learn new spells, some of them are as awesome as Flight or Enchanting. I was thinking like: "I will play for an hour" - and played three instead. The game makes you want to play it all day/night long and you can't stop because you just want to make your Cleric a body magic master so bad! But the fighting systems killed all the interest for me. It got soooo booooring. Most of the battles look like this: enter the turn-based mode and hold the Attack button (or Quck Spell), sometimes heal, sometimes cast something, or step back or aside, but generally it is just pressing one Attack button - that's it. And there are enormous crowds of monsters in every cave, almostlike in Diablo, and some of those monsters have huge healthbars and you have to spend a lot of time holding the Attack button and healing, until you finally clear the cave or the dungeon. Boring, repetitive and requires no tactics, but luring enemies in small groups and cast some resists or buffs. So monotonous, that you just put something heavy on the Attack button and go get yourself some tea. And this constant running and looking for teachers - that gets boring too. Your knight can become a master of the spear, but you have to travel to the city there that master lives. And then to another city, to the master of the shield, and then to the master of the Water magic... And no ships or horses are going there today. Man, that's frustrating! And that damn Bracada desert is extremely annoying. Terrible idea. I hated that location. Have fun playing it and enjoy the game!
Yeah, the atmosphere is awesome. Play the game at night, in March or November, while nobody's home or everyone is asleep. Put on your headphones, turn off the light and dive into the depressing cold empty house, where the lonely lunatic walks around muttering something indistinguishable. But don't expect the gameplay to be as good as an atmosphere. Unfortunately, all you need to do is to walk around and turn on the light. You can also travel to some weird locations and contact with creepy creatures, but the gameplay is quite primitive and non-demanding. Walk around, avoid monsters and turn on the light - that's pretty much it. I would give a game four stars but there is one thing which nearly killed me - in this game you can lose forever. Seriously, you can finish the game with the worst ending possible and with no way to change it, but to start from the beginning. This is just frustrating. I know that you can beat the game in three hours, but that bad ending irritates so much, that you don't want to start it again. That's why I can give it only three stars, sorry IcePick. Maybe, I'll give it a try next fall. Maybe it would be the other way and I'll change my mind.
Beatiful and interesting game which has its own warm and cozy atmosphere and unexpectedly curious plot with some good twists. This is the best game to feel yourself back in the childhood and to dive into the bright colourful world of the fantasy. And it so full of irony and humor! All those jokes on hipsters, time paradoxes or enlightening - loved it, that's amazing. The game could make an awesome movie. But the gameplay - well, let's say it is just not brilliant. Apparently DoubleFine guys got offended when players complained that the first act was too easy to play, so they made the second part of the game much harder. Some puzzles just got annoying, like those robots wiring. Others seem almost impossible to guess - cereals and cleaning bot, or a snake puzzle. Damn that snake puzzle! Did anyone was able to figure that out by himself? Well he or she deserves a medal. After playing Broken Age I've just removed all the other adventure games from my wishlist, because that constant walking back and forth and helpless efforts to try every object in your inventory on every object of the world is extremely annoying. I agree that the first act was too easy, but the second one became overcomplicated. The balance was lost, and in the very end, when all that switching between characters and melting ships issue started, all I've wanted was to open a solution and just follow it until the game is finally finished. Plot and artwork - 5 stars Gameplay - no more than 4.
