Broken Age: Act 1 Reviews
Clever, funny, and thought-provoking, but even without the weight of expectations this is a surprisingly insubstantial and ephemeral experience.
The opening act for Broken Age establishes a wonderfully vibrant world with a surprisingly somber tone. Hopefully, it will all pay off in the second act.
Broken Age does a fine job of creating an outlandish world populated by interesting characters, but is let-down somewhat by its core gameplay. The style and story are both very strong and will draw you into the game; sadly however, adventure games are generally concerned with puzzle solving, and the puzzles found in Broken Age just don't test your little grey cells as much as one would like. They are logical and integrated into the game very well, but there is very little challenge to them. Hopefully, this is down to the game looking to get progressively harder as it goes on and Act 2 will be more challenging. As it is, Act 1 feels a little light.
Beautiful art style, well rounded characters, familiar humour, and heart. At first glance, Broken Age is a visually stunning, polished homage to the adventure games of the past. But it's over all too quickly, without enough challenges to satisfy, or enough innovations to drive the genre forward.
This is only Act 1, of course, as an agonising cliffhanger reminds us, and as such this can only be regarded as a very promising start. Whether or not the concluding part offers the increased breadth and complexity many will be clamouring for as the credits roll is unclear. But it's hard to see anyone reaching the middle point of Vella and Shay's story and not wanting to stay tuned to see where they end up.
The completed Broken Age could well be an excellent game, and I'll be back when it's finished to review it in its entirety. But the better the game turns out to be, the more of a disservice it is to play the first act now. To play it now is to be a part of a process. To play it later is to, well, play it.
In terms of making people want to play because it looks beautiful and strange, rather than because it's an adventure game. Unfortunately the latter creates huge expectations, an albatross they hung around their own neck.
Broken Age's first act does just about enough to stand alone, though it really wasn't supposed to be this way, and that's clearly evident in a game that's slow to start and ends just as it hits its stride. However, gorgeous visuals, cracking performances, and a wonderfully-written script that manages to perfectly blend the serious and the surreal make Broken Age worth a look at this early stage. But we won't be putting a score on it until the whole thing is in our hands.
Adjust your Grim Fandango-fueled expectations and you'll delight in Broken Age: Act One's brief glimmers of story and puzzle genius.