"If Star Wars and LOTR got together and made a slow baby...Eragon would be it"

Most people reading this review will read the title and be like, “What?” To answer that question, I'm going to point out the obvious parts of Eragon that were stripped straight from the Star Wars story but with a Lord of the Rings setting. At the beginning, Eragon goes off with a rogue man and returns to his home to find his uncle dead from fire (Luke returning with Ben Kenobi to find his uncle and aunt had died in a fire). Eragon is granted a dragon, the first dragon-rider since the “extinction” of dragon-riders (the extinction of Jedi). Eragon and the rogue man (his name escapes me) have swords that glow after you do a certain button-press which look and sound like lightsabers! Eragon has magic which he can manipulate objects (the Force). Finally, Eragon is trying to dethrone a dictator (Luke trying to take down Darth Vader). Add orcs that resemble those of Lord of the Rings and other obvious influences and you have Eragon.

There isn't much of a fighting system in Eragon. Certain button combos do different things, but there are seriously like three combos available. Grappling is horrible and waters down the little action there is. Fighting enemies is about as fun as shooting yourself in the foot with a nail gun, because almost all the enemy types, except one or two, are totally unfazed by your attacks. This means that they can just hack at you while you hack at them, causing the character you are to fall backwards which becomes very frustrating and gets old fast. Giant enemies have great attack power, which is obvious, but they also run very fast, meaning that the only strategy of defeating them is jumping and smacking them in the head with your sword. Later on, Eragon gets magic which is also a very frustrating implement. The targeting system for the magic is annoying because Eragon only focuses on things that he can manipulate, unless there is nothing of this sort nearby. You can switch to a different object, but there are usually huge swarms of enemies, which will make this feat nearly impossible to get to the one you want to get to. His magic is also very restricted as he only knows four spells and almost all of them are useless in combat (it's better to just hack-and-slash). The only thing the magic is good for is progressing in the level. Also, the second player gets almost no upgrade which obviously annoys the crap out of the person who has to use the second controller. Dragon-riding will be the big plus to some people, and I'll admit that it is cool at first. However, Eragon sits on top of the dragon and shoots arrows, which don't even kill the enemies in the level while the dragon basically flies around and eat doves. The fighting system could have been awesome, but the developers really wasted it.

Eragon is based on a bad book written by a kid who enjoyed Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and ripped the series off very bluntly. I mean, he didn't even try to hide the fact that he stole the story from Star Wars much at all!

Now, I can't complain much with the graphics except that the characters look horrible, but the environment made it look like I was playing the game on the 360. However, the lighting was horrible and there were some places that were so dark you couldn't even see what you're doing! Sometimes, I would be in one place doing something and the next minute both characters would zoom to another part of the area randomly! I don't know what the hell that was about, but I had this experience multiple times. Have you ever swallowed an axe whole? That's the feeling you'll get after you experience the camera in Eragon. You go from part-to-part in the levels with a fixed camera-angle, which really isn't that bad at first, but sometimes the angles are so irritating that you can't even see where you are in the mess of enemies. This problem is increasingly frequent in Eragon's co-op mode.

Voice-acting is superb of course, because the game uses the actors and actresses from the movie. The score is great also, but the phrases that the characters say get really old. They repeat lines over and over until it makes you want to scream and bash your PS2 into a wall.

This is one of the shortest games I have ever played. Eragon is painfully short that it can be beaten in less than two hours! That isn't exaggerating either. A way to save short games would be to pack it with replayability, but the only replayability that Eragon offers is the very boring sport of finding secret dragon eggs which unlock worthless garbage that nobody cares about.

My honest opinion is that neither fans of the book nor the movie should try this game. This is one of the worst games I have ever had the displeasure of playing.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/18/06