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Broken Age: Act 2 Review for PlayStation 4 (PS4)

Broken Age: Act 2 Review for PlayStation 4 (PS4)

Broken Game

All right! Act 2 of Broken Age is finally out and ready to be played. It’s been a long time, but the Double Fine Kickstarter project is finally complete. Now you finally get to see what happens to Shay and Vella. I’m ready. Let’s go!

What the heck was I doing again?

Jumping into Broken Age: Act 2 is a jarring experience, to say the least. The game simply continues, as if no time has passed. You don’t get a “previously on” cutscene, a narrator, or even a simple text-crawl to refresh you on what you had been doing. You just start playing, as if you had completed the game just yesterday.

The problem? You didn’t complete the game just yesterday. You completed the game a year ago. All the characters that Shay and Vella had interacted with in the first act have pretty much faded from your mind at this point. All the events of Act 1 are fuzzy in your memory, and while you remember a few standout moments like the worrisome tree or the sly wolf on the space ship, the things these characters did and said are lost unless you go back and play Act 1 all over again.

Broken Age: Act 2 Screenshot

As a result, the presentation of Broken Age: Act 2 is rather weak because it leans on assuming you experienced Act 1 . As is to be expected, Shay now has to travel through Vella’s world, and Vella has to travel through Shay’s ship. This means most of the characters and environments form Act 1 are reused, giving it all a “been there done that” feel.

You’d think this wouldn’t be the case, considering you probably can’t remember Act 1 all that well, but you’d be wrong. The game expects you to remember the events of Act 1 and very frequently references them. You are expected to use items you gathered from Act 1 , along with information you were given from Act 1 , to figure out where to go and what to do next. It kind of feels like characters are taunting you, expecting you to know something incredibly obvious that you just can’t remember. You know you have seen these characters before, but you have no idea what they are talking about. This makes Broken Age: Act 2 feel too familiar and too spontaneous at the same time.

Most of Broken Age; Act 2 ’s failings are in its puzzles. It takes a lot from old Sierra point and click adventure games. That is to say, most of the puzzles don’t employ any sense of logic of problem solving. Instead, all you are really doing is rubbing every item in your inventory on everything you can see until the game dings and you are allowed to proceed onward.

Broken Age: Act 2 Screenshot

None of the solutions in the game are obvious. In fact, sometimes it appears as if the solution is obvious, with characters going as far as actually mentioning items in your inventory that you should be able to use, but instead you have to solve the problems in some other roundabout way. It very much expects you to be inside the head of the programmer, and I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what the inside of Tim Schaefer’s head looks like. Maybe I should go replay Psychonauts .

The problem is that brute forcing your way through puzzles isn’t fun. You never get a feeling of accomplishment for figuring out the right item to use. Instead it feels like you are just doing busy work before you can see the next part of the story.

The game tried to tie puzzle solutions together with switching characters and getting clues in the other scenario. Unfortunately, this isn’t obvious at all. It’s never quite clear when you have to switch, and since Act 1 allowed you to go through every character’s story fully and completely before the end, there’s no real impetus to switch until you get stuck, and at that point you are just more likely to put the game down.

And there’s so much backtracking! Ninety percent of the game is gathering items from one location and then traveling the map to go to another and see if you can use them, back and forth and back and forth until you have brute forced the solution. This isn’t just puzzle solving incompetency, it’s built into the design. Many times the items you need to solve a particular puzzle are on opposite ends of the explorable world, and walking back and forth through these environments you have already seen gets boring quick.

On the upside, the story is still very interesting. The prospect of figuring out what the heck is going on, why Shay is on a monster/spaceship, why Vella’s culture kept “feeding” people to the monster Mog Chothra, and more, keeps you playing even when the game gets frustrating. A couple story elements were wrapped up in a particularly sloppy manner, but overall I have to say I was satisfied with where the plot went. It’s a bit more interesting in the beginning of the game than at the end, as you run into a couple sudden twists that fall flat and end up being forgettable, but it pushed me toward the end nonetheless.

Broken Age: Act 2 Screenshot

The graphics also complement the game well. The storybook feel that the game gives you is perfect for the sort of tale it weaves. The new areas and characters you do meet are rather well drawn, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them.

The voice acting is also top notch, and is probably where the game shines the brightest. The star studded cast does a phenomenal job, and even though certain characters aren’t exactly believable, they are fun caricatures whose personalities alleviate the slog of having to talk to them over and over as you backtrack and try to puzzle solve.

Double Fine did try to address some of the problems fans had with Act 1 . Act 2 is almost twice as long as Act 1 , and fans did complain about its short length, but unfortunately a lot of this length comes across as padding. Fans complained that the two stories seems very separate in Act 1 , so Act 2 intertwines them, but doesn’t make it obvious. Fans complained that Act 1 ’s puzzles were too simple, and so Act 2 ’s puzzle are now so difficult you have to brute force them. I give them credit for trying, but now everything has swung too far in the opposite direction.

It’s sad really, because Broken Age was a phenomenal premise. Heck, I admit I had fun and ended Act 2 with a smile, but thinking back on the experience as a whole, its flaws are obvious. I’d recommend playing Act 2 if you already picked up Act 1 , but go into it with the knowledge that there will be issues that might frustrate you.

It’s important that Broken Age was made, and it’s important that it got so much money from Kickstarter. Arguably, it single-handedly changed the face of indie game funding. To the same end, I’d say it’s important to finish Broken Age and see where all that money went. It stands as a fantastic example of both the goods and bads of Kickstarter. It’s obvious how Double Fine attempted to give their audience what they said they wanted, even though that’s not what they actually wanted. It’s obvious that the studio had to rush the first part of the game out last year, and how both acts were really meant to be one game. It’s obvious where corners had to be cut and assets had to be reused. But even though all of these flaws it’s still an interesting and enjoyable game with a weird sci-fi meets Cthulhu premise that would have never gotten greenlighted otherwise, and that alone is reason enough to play it.

Broken Age: Act 2 may stumble a bit trying to be something it isn’t, but what it is, is still gorgeous and enthralling, and I’ll put up with some frustrating puzzles and backtracking for that.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.5 Graphics
The storybook style world does wonders to compliment the story. 3.0 Control
The point and click interface feels loser than some other adventure games we have played in recent times. 5.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The star studded cast is absolutely fantastic. The voice acting is easily the best part of the game. 3.0 Play Value
The puzzles are frustrating and there is a lot of backtracking, but I’d wholly recommend playing it. 3.4 Overall Rating – Fair
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Original soundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell, recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestr.
  • All-star voice cast, including Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Jennifer Hale, Wil Wheaton, and Pendleton Ward.
  • Some jokes. Unless you don’t think they’re funny, in which case we totally weren’t trying to be funny.
  • This one really hard puzzle that you won’t get but you’ll look it up online and not tell anybody.

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