Eragon demo flaps onto XBLM, impressions
A demo for Eragon -- the "official" game of Fox's upcoming movie -- has hit Marketplace. Now, let's get one thing straight. I am completely unfamiliar with this material. I have not read the books, and so I can only judge the game for itself. For any Eragonites out there, please keep that in mind. With that out of the way, the demo is pretty "meh." The first thing anyone will notice is that this is obviously not a 360 game. In fact, it barely looks like a PS2 game. The water in particular looked god-awful. The game actually reminded me a little of Soul Reaver with slightly more detail (and worse combat). As far as gameplay is concerned, it's pretty much derivative of the EA Lord of the Rings games. There are plenty of combos with long animations, projectiles, and limited magic. You get to call in your dragon for a few scripted bits of destruction, but that's it. There is no dragon riding in the demo. Beyond that, I couldn't help but be struck by a few things. One, I have this badass dragon, but I'm killing all these baddies myself? Also, I find it a little odd that one arrow manages to take out your dragon friend about halfway through the demo, but it takes five arrows for me to kill one human archer. Weird. All in all, the demo isn't terrible but I doubt it will convince you to pay sixty bucks for the retail version; it might be a decent rental, though.
