Likewise Vella pretty much just shrugs when she finds herself in a high-tech battleship and says "let's just keep smashing things like I was before". Seeing Shay adjust to the outside world could have been interesting, but he doesn't really show any wonder at the outside world or trouble getting used to it, so all those revelations fall flat. I also don't really trust the writers to show us anything interesting in a sequel. Way I see it the writers aren't deliberately leaving a bunch of sequel hooks, they just failed to provide a full, satisfying ending that tied everything up properly. They show a ton of epilogue scenes in stills during the credits implying everything pretty much sorted itself out (however implausible that may be, seeing as there's nothing to stop the Thrush bombing to bits everyone who tries to use the bridge), and that a year later everyone's just celebrating like a bunch of best buds in spit of all the past human sacrifices. Two small bookkeeping notes: This review contains spoilers for Act I.Ehh, the story's pretty much over I'd say.
If you want a quick and dirty, spoiler-free review, I’ll tell you I don’t think Broken Age is especially worth your time.Īlso, for the purposes of this review I went back and replayed Act I of Broken Age, having forgotten almost everything about it in the fifteen months since I played it. It won’t make you appreciate Act II more. Retreading Act I right before playing Act II just throws the conclusion’s issues into starker relief. The problem with Broken Age Act II is that it ends. I don’t actually think Broken Age Act II is much worse than Act I. Objectively, both halves have the same issues: The puzzles are bad (even for a point-and-click adventure game), the story is contrived, and there’s little-to-no depth to both the characters and the environments. Set up the locations (Shay’s baby’s-first-spaceship and Vella’s monster-threatened world), andĪnd Act I accomplished all those things.Set up the characters (dual protagonists Shay and Vella).But somehow Act II feels like more of a letdown. It didn’t necessarily accomplish them with aplomb-see my complaints about the characters and environments lacking depth-but it did them. And then it dropped a hell of an ending on us, revealing that the “monster” Vella had been battling through her whole story was actually the exterior of Shay’s ship.īoom. If you’re going to arbitrarily split your game into two episodes midway through development, you could do worse than that cliffhanger. I wasn’t amazed by Act I, but I felt like it was a solid foundation for Act II to build on.Īct II squanders that foundation. It’s not exactly worse, per se, but it’s also not better-and this time there’s no chance an “ Act III” is going to fall from the sky and rectify the game’s many, many issues. What’s worse is that neither character seems perplexed by their changed circumstances. Vella lived her entire life in a semi-primitive baking society, but seems totally at ease in Shay’s electronics-ridden ship. Shay, for that matter, lived inside the confines of that tiny ship his entire life-and yet he doesn’t bat an eye upon seeing the ocean, for instance, or an entire floating city made out of clouds. In five minutes, Shay meets more people living on a cloud city than he’s met his entire life. That lack of meaningful character exploration was honestly the biggest problem with Act I, and if anything it gets worse in Act II. It’s an entire cast of robots! No feelings. Just soulless automatons that exist to get or give items. Act I seemed like it at least had some well-trod-but-earnest ideas about adolescence. Act II has nothing but a trope-filled science fiction story you’ve heard a thousand times over, filled with empty characters.Ĭhief offender is Vella, who has zero character development in Act II beyond people saying “She was right the whole time and we should’ve listened.” Most of her story in Act II is actually spent uncovering more information about Shay. That and plodding up and down empty hallways.
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