Broken Age: Act 2 Reviews
I really want to love Broken Age Act 2 as much as I loved the first part. As a complete package, the game is beautiful, funny and well-designed.
Good but inconsistent, with an anticlimactic end
It feels rushed, uncreative and so lacking in the passion that made the first act great.
Let us try to imagine a world where crowdfunding somehow still exists 20 years from now. Perhaps then, we will all be invited to pay for a return to the halcyon days of Broken Age. We would probably do it. There would certainly be precedent.
Broken Age sadly suffers from a case of too much. The watercolor art style, humorous dialogue, and clever writing are unfortunately buried under too much backtracking, too much obscurity, and therefore, too much frustration. On the one hand, you can't help but get that Portal-esque "A-ha!" feeling when you solve a puzzle. But when you stumble upon a solution after frantically combining objects at random and presenting them to every NPC under the sun that makes you tap into your inner John McEnroe and say, "You cannot be serious," you can literally feel the joy sucking out of the room. I want to see a return of the point-and-click genre, but not at the expense of my sanity.
Beautiful in its aesthetics, smart in its user-interface, yet ultimately lacking in almost every other key area, Broken Age: Act 2 is mightily disappointing on its own. Since it comes as a free update to those that already laid money down for Act 1, thankfully no money will feel like it has been wasted. Anyone picking up the full package on a non-PC format, though, might feel a touch more down and bitter, since the second half is not a patch on the first part and the cost outlay will be fresher in their minds.
There are a few bumps along the way, but overall Broken Age is a fun ride