Eragon may be a Dragon-rider but he lacks the dynamism to save the buyers of this game from imminent doom...
Being a fantasy game, the game involves the use of a lot of magic, and dragons, wizards, orcs, etc. people the world of Eragon, which is very typical of its genre. In fact, playing this game would remind you of the Lord of the Rings games, which isn’t that big a surprise considering that the same developers have worked on both the titles. But this game lacks the polish of the Lord of the Rings games to the extent of feeling unfinished and reeks of a half-hearted attempt by the developers.
The story of the game revolves around a young farm boy, Eragon, who lives in a place called Alagaesia. One day, while out hunting, he stumbles upon a glowing blue egg which he mistakes for a stone and decide to keep it. To his amazement, a dragon eventually hatches from the egg and he comes to know that he shares a magical bond with the dragon. In due course, he also realizes that he can telepathically communicate with the dragon, Saphira, and that he has been chosen as a Dragon-rider destined to fight the evil that’s sweeping across the fantasy world at a tyrants’ order. He also discovers about Arya, the elf who gave him the egg, who is being held captive by the tyrant, Durza. Now, it is up to our hero, Eragon, and a couple of his side-kick companions to save the day and kill the evil tyrant. You, as Eragon, will experience this transformation of a weak farmer into a sword-wielding, dragon-riding, orc-hunting savior of the world. The story is told through cut-scenes which looks artistic but lacks a good narration. Anybody who has not read the book will be completely at sea with regards to its plot.
This action-adventure game, like many other, involves a lot of hacking-n-slashing. In the beginning, you start it off with a sword and a bow, and these will remain the only real-world weapons that you will get to carry through the game’s 16 monotonous levels filled with its generic and uninteresting enemies. With the sword, you can perform a quick strike, a powerful attack, or you can also string together the ‘quick and the powerful’ to perform a total of four special moves like grapples and knock-downs. Grappling in this game is horrible but when you successfully capture an enemy, you can either throw him away or beat him out of his life. Three of the four combos are totally useless since the enemies can easily block them; while the fourth combo is useful mostly only after you have jumped and used a strong attack on the enemy to make them stagger, a trick that you will be using from the beginning till the end. Once the big orcs appear, the combat becomes even more tedious as they make you fall backwards every time they hit you which become old very fast, and your only available option to kill them is to use the jump-strong attack-4th combo trick. Did the developers really intend it to be a no brainer-button masher?
The enemies in this game pose no challenge, you can easily dispose them off but it takes a good many sword attacks to do so, kill one only to repeat the process on a dozen more, so many that it becomes more tedious than entertaining. The sword is not your only weapon; you also get to use bow-n-arrow, which again is a disappointing factor. As it is, the sword takes a good 6-7 strong jump attacks to kill an orc, but the bow is an even weaker weapon. With it, you can pick off enemies from a great distance but it will take a great many quick-shots before an enemy goes down, or you can perform a single-hit kill by holding down the strong-shot button for a few seconds before letting the arrow on its way, which feels annoying from the beginning.
But again, the real-world weapons aren’t the only tricks up Eragon’s sleeve. Magic fills the air of this fantasy world, and he eventually learns some useful magical tricks which aides him in combat. However, like the combat combos in this game, the magic is also very restricted and there are only a few different spells that you can cast. With the help of magic, you can burn nearby enemies and set them running off in agony, or you can also take on the far-away enemies by pushing or pulling them off a ledge or a cliff. Though these magical acts are fun to use at first, they get old very fast and don’t really liven up the combat. In addition, you can also combine magic with your Bow and fire magical arrows destroying a few enemies at one go, but since there are always huge swarms of enemies going at you, you seldom do get to use these. There are also places where you will find magical arrows planted on the ground, waiting for your magic to set them off at targets, but you don’t often use these either because of the same reason as above.
There are also some platforming sequences included in the game. At various points in the game, you will be asked to leap small gaps, climb structures, balance and creep on narrow beams, etc. none of which is least bit challenging. It all feels very uninteresting. Magic also plays a part here as you will have to interact with the environment using it and create a way forward by re-arranging loose boards, huge stones, etc. This could have been a saving grace but ends up as un-interesting since you can’t choose what you interact with. There are pre-determined structures for you to interact with and that makes it very boring.
As a dragon-rider, you also get to ride a dragon in a few levels and these are the worst that the game has to offer. The dragon-riding levels are very poorly done and are very repetitious. To put it simply, you will be circling a small area over and over again killing your re-spawning enemies with the Dragon’s fire breath and your magical arrows until a certain number is reached. It feels flat.
Graphically, the environments in this game come across as the game’s only saving grace. The forests, dungeons, rivers, etc. all look beautiful. The cut-scenes look artistic and stunning. However, many of the levels look similar which only makes this linear and repetitive game even more monotonous. The character models is a big let-down, they are all blocky and horrible to look at. There is no variation in the enemy models, you see one orc and you’ve seen them all, it ends up making you feel as if you’re fighting an army of clones. The character animations aren’t any better even though some of the finishing moves look brutal; there are many occasions when the animation feels unnatural.
Eragon employs fixed camera angles for that cinematic feel of the God of War, but fails miserably. It looks nice in the beginning, but pretty soon you will come to experience its shortcomings. There will be many occasions when you will get lost among the hordes of enemies and will have to fight blindly. The co-op mode only complicates the problem of getting lost among the crowd. There will be times when you won’t be able to see your enemies who will keep on attacking you. In times like these, you will have to just use your bow and auto-aim to pick them off from a distance without even seeing them.
The sound department also disappoints. The voice-over acting is just average which is a big surprise considering the fact that the actors from the movie provided their service to bring the game to life. The game is full of repetitious one-liners. The instrumental background music varies from great to mediocre. A big surprise is that we don’t get to hear a single clink of steel against steel in a game like this where the characters often indulge in sword-fight.
Eragon is a short game which can easily be finished in less than six hours. Next to no re-playability factor, lack of worthy unlockables, etc. doesn’t help matters either. The game can be played co-operatively with another player on the same screen, but the fact that both of them will have to move in unison results in an even more irritating game-play experience. It would have been much better if there was an online co-op mode with each player having his/her own screen to play on, but there is none.
A half-hearted attempt by the developers, Eragon is everything that a good game should not be – it is repetitious, as linear as a game can possible be, it has similar looking and monotonous levels, restrictive combat, annoying camera angles, one-dimensional enemy artificial intelligence, bland character designs, and to top it all, it is a very short game with no replay value whatsoever and lacks online mode. There’s only one thing left for me to say, IGNORE IT!
Score: 4 (equivalent of: Below average in most aspects. A half-assed attempt by the designers.)