While Act 1 was wonderful, I feel like the game just fell apart in Act 2. There's a feeling of it having been rushed, and so many details you'd expect to have been finessed over the long wait for Act 2 are just glossed over. Yes, the game is finally complete, but Act 1 was far better written in terms of story telling. Having completed the game at long last, I'm sad to say I didn't enjoy Act 2 as much as I did Act 1, and to that point, the game is just...meh. There's just no sense of accomplishment when all is over.

It really does seem like everything that was hyped up just falls apart at the end. Sorry to everyone who was as dissapointed as I was.

Quick disclaimer for this review: I have 9.6 hours on record for this game, but the time played for the game is actually half of that (at around 5 hours), as I revisited the game to replay the first part and screw around for achievements, before giving up entirely. I've included some spoilers for the game under warning. Be aware of it if you don't want spoilers.

Having that said: It is now three years later. The Double Fine Adventure kickstarter asked for $400,000 to make this game and they were given $3.45 million to do it. Double Fine, rather than budgeting themselves to stay within that target, sold the first half of the game on Steam so they could raise money for the second half. They already had more money than they needed, but they still sold a half-finished game to bring in more funds, bringing up to around the $4 million mark. It also took them over a year to release the second installment of the game.

Broken Age is like eating a beautiful, delicious cake, and finding out that Double Fine saved money on frosting by using leftover spackle. Then you have to watch Double Fine eating better, more edible cake, bought with your money.


ART:
The game itself is, admittedly, gorgeous. The art style and animations are very well done. The voice over talent, too, is pretty decent. I'm tired of hearing Wil Wheaton drone his way through video games, but Pendleton Ward and Jennifer Hale are welcome sounds for your ear-drums. That's where the general positivity ends.

STORY:
The story is abysmal. You play as two characters, Shay and Vella. Shay is trapped on a spaceship under a domineering, overly-loving computer named MOM, with basically no life. Vella is about to be sacrificed to the Lovecraftian "Mog Chothra" monster because "tradition." You control each character in turn, and can switch between either, but they're both sectioned off and unrelated adventures for the most part. In Act 1, the game does a pretty decent job of setting up mysteries: What is Mog Chothra? Who is Marek the Wolf? Why is the ship's computer, MOM, so seemingly hell-bent on imprisoning Shay? Who is the mysterious man in the DeadEye Mountain and how does he have technology like we see on Shay's ship? Why are we still pretending Wil Wheaton has a career in acting when he only ever plays himself with a beard?

In Act 2, these questions are swept under a rug quickly. Players are plied with half-hearted exposition, contrived answers, and massive plot holes that are never filled. Characters from the first game are given completely different rules and motivations than before, but offer no explanation for their behavior change. Shay is useless in the grand scheme of the game, and affects NOTHING of the outcome, when you get right down to it. Acts 1 and 2 favor Vella heavily as the "get ♥♥♥♥ done" protagonist and she gets most of the interesting story as a result. Getting into spoiler territory below.

***SPOILERS***

The portrayal of the characters is severely infuriating, too. Shay is a poor protagonist, especially in light of Vella's achievements throughout the game. Shay affects almost nothing story-wise and, in some cases, actually causes problems for Vella as a result of his actions. He is infantilized, both by his overbearing mother and his reliance on child toys for assistance. At one point in Act 2, he is actually, literally replaced by a blow-up doll, while other characters comment on how useless he is. Vella, by contrast, is smart, capable, solves most of the game's big puzzles, directly fights the game's main enemies, and we are told explicitly that she is the most important character in the game because her blood is coveted by the enemies.

The enemies of Broken Age are introduced in the last hour of the game (if you complete Shay's half of Act 2 first) and they barely make an appearance until the last 15 minutes. They are cadaver-white, mutated humans, that have been using eugenics to "purify" themselves and they use the Mog Chothra ships to secure targets for eugenics testing or something. The game kind of skips over most of the exposition when it comes to their history, character, and motivations, confining it all to a single conversation with Vella before she fission bombs them back to the stone age.

The end result is that Shay is a useless boy, easily replaced, and isn't capable of resolving issues without his child toys. Vella is a strong black girl using death lasers and nuclear bombs to take on the (essentially) Aryan Establishment, who desperately want her blood so they can fix their failing genetic structure. The game ends when Vella melts both Mog Chothra ships together into a literal bridge between the "normal" world and the Plague Dam, offering no further information about what the characters do, or how the story ends.

***SPOILERS***

If I wasn't so aware of Tim Schafer's personal politics, I'd almost assume it's unintentional, but it comes off as preachy, pretentious, and frustratingly lackluster.

GAMEPLAY:
The place where this game truly, truly fails... is the game-play. That's a cardinal sin in gaming.

Some of the puzzles for Broken Age are clever. They remind me of old-school gaming, where the solutions to problems generally involved the inventive use of a otherwise off-the-wall item to resolve issues. In the entirity of Broken Age, I'd say there's about a dozen examples of this and it works well for the game. The problem is the other several dozen puzzles, which are not intuitive, inventive, or explained. I'm going to save you all time right now and tell you that one of the puzzles in Act 2, regarding a Boa Constrictor, requires that you stop playing the game for three minutes and wait. The game does not tell you this and does not give an immediate or clear indication that the you should wait. It's not explained before this that the snake will get tired and fall off so you can collect him. It was only after getting frustrated and looking up what to do with the snake that I, and my friends, realized you had to stop playing the game for a few minutes to progress in it. Another cardinal sin.

The WORST PUZZLE IN THE GAME is a wiring puzzle, in which you have to rewire helper robots to perform different functions. This isn't easily explained, the instructions aren't listed in a spot that is easily accessed, and even then, they're not marked as instructions on how to fix up the robot. You have to perform this puzzle at least 5 TIMES, although that number skyrockets if you don't know what you're doing, and the answer is ALWAYS randomized, so you can't just look it up. Trying to figure out this rewiring puzzle easily took up over 45 minutes of my time before the game gave me a hint that the answer was somewhere in Vella's half of Act 2. It was another hour before I found the instructions and realized what they were for. The fact that I had to perform the rewiring puzzle another 4 times after this, for different robot "modes", was just lazy and not fun in the slightest.

The rest of the puzzles in the game either had really boring solutions (like raising/lowering the pH of a mixture, which was more time-consuming than difficult), or they were just run-of-the-mill item fetch quests for things that shouldn't be issues. Shay has a cupcake, at one point, with icing on it and you need to take the icing off, but Shay refuses to just take the icing off. Why the hell is this even an problem!?

SUMMARY:
This is a gorgeous game beset by a lot of gameplay and story issues. Double Fine CLEARLY rushed through development on Act 2 and it shows. There are massive plotholes, the game has no real ending, and the puzzles they set up are lazy in Act 2. The fact that Tim Schafer says this game is a success and he plans to do another kickstarter is reason enough not to support this game, especially after the SpaceBase debacle.

TL;DR:
Game is pretty, but dumb and not fun at some parts. Save your money, buy a better adventure game.

After waiting a year between installments, the finished product that is Broken Age really wasn't worth the wait.
The first half of the game left a lot to be desired, while the second part had me begging for it to end.
Gameplay is very simple, and while it does get harder in the second part, it does so by making puzzles a lot more obtuse, and only begins to get complex towards the very end.

The music is very nice, but the music loops really quickly and drones on and on in more stressful situations (perfectly matching the gameplay) and characters repeat their lines a lot which broke the immersion for me.
The art style really is outstanding, but many art assets are quite low resolution when played in 1080p, leaving a lot to be desired.

I don't hate this game, but it did disappoint me and I really wouldn't recommend it.
Veterans of the genre will tire of the simple gameplay, and casual players wouldn't put up with the many brick walls this game presents.

Broken Age does have a very nice atmosphere and I kinda enjoyed my time playing it, but nothing really stuck out, I didn't find anything very memorable at all.
Except the knife character, he's the saving grace.

Edited after act 2 release.

What a wonderful game. Finally a quality adventure game. I can't really find anything negative about it except for it's length. I know there will a second part sometime in the future, but no one knows when. At least i hope it will be same as good as the act 1 which was amazing. But still i wouldn't pay the full price for it. This game was crowdfunded and got more than enough money, so they could've released the whole game.
It reminds me of those old adventure games. Beautiful environments and artstyle. Great voice acting and wonderful music follows you through the whole first act. You're carried away into that beautiful world and don't want to stop playing. And the story is top notch, you keep thinking how the two characters are connected and when you find out, it's amazing and keeps wanting to play act 2 as soon as possible.

Sadly the second act is not that good. No, it's really bad. After waiting for soooooo long i expected something more than backtracking to the same locations as in first act. Now you changed places, you are running back and forth in the spaceship with Vella this time and Shay is in the clouds. Same locations, new puzzles. Like the same locations is not enough, the puzzles became stupidly hard and it breaks the experience. All that running around in the same locations gets boring and you don't have a clue how to solve the puzzles. I don't want to play it anymore, i lost the interest because of the stupid puzzles. There's absolutely no logic behind them. You don't know what you supposed to do.
I can't recommend this. It is made by lazy developers who have wasted the money no one knows where.
Just go and buy something better like Broken sword 5, The Book of unwritten tales 2 or even the Runaway games.

(Review is mostly about Act II. Avoided giving any spoilers).

Man, I hate giving this game a negative review. I really wanted this ♥♥♥♥ to be awesome. I never really played adventure games before Broken Age's kickstarter happened, and the genre just seemed to explode in popularity.

The first Act of the game was great. Superb. Loved it. Interesting world, interesting puzzles that made me go DOH!, fun characters (even if they could be a bit one dimensional sometimes). The tone of the game was calm despite what drove the two main characters.

Then Act II came out. And... eeeeeh.

The big chunk of Act II for both characters is a very long fetch quest. Or at least it feels that way. A very, very long segment that prevents the story from progressing. In Act II, each puzzle pushed me closer to the next grand environment. In Act I, I was running around all the environments I'd already gone to, and it just wasn't as fun.

Both stories blow their big twists very quickly, which are ♥♥♥♥ing amazing. Problem is that I consider them the climax, as the game feels like it just wants to end after that, but feels like it needs to live up to what I hear are 'classic adventure game puzzles', which to me just felt obtuse and forced me to get hints online.

Everything just began to feel rushed after the twists. Knowing Double Fine's budget problems behind the scenes, I understand why this is the case, but the game's still unsatisfying.

I'm a bit bummed by the lack of Merek at the end. The conversations you get to have with him are awesome. But I wanted more of him. He's my favorite character in a cast of characters I really enjoyed (outside Vella's family, which I don't think got enough screen time to feel important like Shay's 'mom' and 'dad').

So when you get to the end, it feels like everything is on a timer and death is soon to come if you don't act NOW. I understand putting a timer on the game would pressure puzzle fans, and I don't want a timer. But I would have enjoyed if the characters seemed more stressed out. There is an entire gang of characters sitting around and doing nothing. I know they can't really do much, but they just seem grumpy or otherwise docile.

The ending is weak. Won't get into it, but I considered it weak.