Review: Eragon (PS2)

Jump, then Strong Attack. Got it? It causes Eragon, the "Dragon Rider", to perform a leaping sword-slash that is available for the start of this dragon-movie-based game. It is unblockable, leaves him temporarily invulnerable, and throws most enemies off the side of the endless ledges that fill the game world. And it will reduce the clear time of this most inept attempt at a licensed videogame to less than four hours. As goofs go, it's a rudimentary error, a simple case of an undertested gameplay feature being put into an already undemanding title. Unfortunately it stands as just one of a battery of oversights that make Eragon such an unforgivably dull videogame.

While there clearly must have been a substantial budget for the title, none of it is especially evident. Voice talent comes from four members of the film cast and what appear to be two of the game's production staff, phoning in predictable dialogue with all the enthusiasm of a brick. While apparently gaining use of the likenesses of all the film's actors, their faces appear to have been variously grafted onto a misshapen potatoes and blind robots carved from meat. And for a game that proposes to flesh out the film's story, the cut scenes are ineptly executed, badly written, and completely fail to inform the player about the plot, characters, locations or indeed why anyone should care enough to play the next level.

And care they shouldn't. Why would anyone wish to inflict upon themselves another level that contain waves of only two types of enemy, and token interactive points to drag out level clear-times? While blatantly riffing on (or rather ripping off) EA's enjoyably simplistic Lord of the Rings action games, it never reaches their lofty heights of execution, or even appears to have been designed with 'being played' in mind. Not to say the title fails to be essentially playable - the engine is relatively solid, graphics and game code holding together throughout. But for all the strength of the technological skeleton, the flesh has been blu-tacked onto it in haphazard fashion.

Some levels seem to be navigable only with help from the development team or an FAQ - half an hour jumping around an area merely to find the way forward is intolerable in a modern videogame. The only time that things take a turn for the better is the rare opportunity to control your lizard side-kick (curiously for a Dragon Rider, Eragon spends most of his time travelling from A to B on foot) - even then it only improves by sheer novelty. Poorly calibrated controls combine with a limited number of useful moves rendering what should be fantasy-fulfilment action into a sub-Panzer Dragoon flail around repetitive environments.

It seems bizarre that any title made in 2006 should have so many problems that were growing unacceptable in the PS1 days. Bewildering anachronisms include an inability to save control, video and audio settings; the absence of any widescreen mode (though a "Letterbox" setting provides masochists a way to make the characters even harder to see); and an inability to skip cut-scenes. It smacks of an under-ambitious and lazy development, though judging from the back-slapping "making-of" videos that represent the only unlockable extra, the team seems unsettlingly proud of their already-outdated achievement. The biggest mystery is how "one of the world's greatest game developers", as they so modestly put it, can still be in business without playing more than one game since the 90s. They lack so much confidence in their own playing ability, it seems, that they've made a game only a five-year-old would have difficulty finishing.

Any sense of excitement is sucked away by the complete lack of risk involved in the experience. Even when restraining one's self from using the easiest, most powerful attack at every turn, the Game Over screen rarely appears. The entire move-list is unlocked within the first hour of play, and without upping the stakes or mixing up the tedious gameplay it often feels as if they player has been included merely to push the camera into the next part of the game world. That the environments rarely stretch beyond the realms of fantasy cliche doesn't aid matters. A co-op option makes it a problem halved, but dragging another victim along for the ride can't lessen the sense that this is a game that was released without ever being play-tested.

With film license returns likely to be high, in the end Sierra and Stormfront never really had to make Eragon good to profit from it. One half high-return investment bond, one half tedious waste of time, its place as part of the film's marketing campaign seems more important than it actually being playable. If it is as representative of the film as the developers claim, then Eragon is a clumsy rehash of previous, more successful works, sewn together with worn-out cliches. An utterly pointless game.

Rating: 3 / 10

Words by Colin Whiteside