Just like Act 1, the animation, music, and voice acting are all still great. Most importantly for this adventure fan using unlikely items in pointless ways almost always brings out a witty response rather than the stock “that doesn’t work” s**t some less impressive adventures try to pull. While Broken Age isn’t a laugh riot like Monkey Island (to anyone who’s played Schafer’s other games like Grim Fandango this isn’t a surprise) it does get the jabs in to keep you playing even if the story peters out. These guys along with the knitted Pals, Jack Black’s Harm’ny Lightbeard and Wil Wheaton’s now ex-lumberjack Curtis are hugely entertaining, although Vella and Shay still make lovely travelling companions. The talking tree remains a highlight, and Act 1’s brilliant pedantic spoon is joined by a slightly psychotic knife and a fork who broke the spoon’s heart. This has always been Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s forte and Broken Age is some of their best work. The writing though in general is excellent, by which I mean the character dialogue. This isn’t always a bad thing - look at Day of the Tentacle for example - but it’s majorly disappointing when Vella is brought in to the villain’s lair inside the ominous Plague Dam and we never get to explore it. For the most part Shay just explores Vella’s locations from Act 1, and vice versa. Well, it clearly wasn’t enough, as there are only a couple of new locations in Act 2 outside of cutscenes. Double Fine have very publicly said that the Kickstarter funds ran out over a year ago and they’d been funding it themselves, so they released Act 1 to boost their budget.

Moreover the villains of the story make next to no appearance before they’re destroyed utterly, and you don’t even get to see their base despite being supposedly in it.Īh yes, that brings me to my next disappointment in Act 2: there are a few too many cut corners here, particularly regarding locations. Shay and Vella barely get any time together at all before the credits cut in, and the final puzzle results in a massive stroke of luck that defies possibility as well as making no sense (see puzzles, later). It’s hard to get into too much story detail without spoilers, but I’ll definitely say that the ending left me unsatisfied. The reason I think this is that several major story points from Act 1 are done away with (most notably Shay’s computer-based “Mom” and “Dad” whose real identities are “revealed” in the first few minutes of Act 2), and several plot points are outright contradicted with the flimsiest of explanations. I have absolutely no doubt that the story changed sometime between the completion of Act 1 and now. You’ll be pleased to hear that most of these things continue to be great in Act 2, in fact I only have trouble with one of them that I’ll get to in due course… no, f*** suspense, it’s the story. The animation, the sound, music and voice acting, the story and writing were all superb. Let me remind you of the good things in Act 1. Now the pair have changed places, with Vella aboard the now hideously damaged ship and Shay stranded on the surface, and things are going to go from bad to worse for them. Now for everyone else, when we last left Vella and Shay it was revealed that Mog Chothra, the monster terrorizing Vella’s village and many more, was actually the “spaceship” that Shay called home. I don’t want to spoil things too much for this Act, but if you haven’t played Act 1 skip this paragraph. The end of Act 1 saw Shay and Vella brought together, then separated again.

Oh, and I’ll reiterate that I was a Kickstarter backer again, although you’re not going to find my name in the credits or anything. Therefore consider this review an extension to my Broken Age: Act 1 review which you should have a read of first. Anyone who bought Act 1 gets the conclusion for free.

The most important thing to remember about Broken Age: Act 2 is that it is literally the second half of a game and has not been sold as a separate product.

Nevertheless three years is a long time, although admittedly not to make a game from scratch complete with a new engine, but I’m sure many people are still eager to know how Shay and Vella’s stories, not to mention Double Fine’s big gamble, turned out. Some may say the public has soured on Kickstarter since - Yooka-Laylee’s £1.5 million at the time of writing says otherwise. That makes it nearly exactly three years since Double Fine funded their Adventure and the public went crazy for Kickstarter. Has it really been a year since the first half of Broken Age came out? Wow.

Broken age hexipal puzzle