All my life, I’ve loved fantasy books. I’ll read anything written by Tolkien, Robert Jordan, or the Weis and Hickman books from the Dragonlance series. I’ve taken up countless days of my life reading these finely crafted tales of Frodo, Rand al’Thor, and Raistlin Majere. I wanted to give this background before stating I’ve never read Eragon or seen the movie. And after playing the 360 version of the game tie-in to the movie, I have to say, I hope the book and movie are good, because this game is AWFUL.

To begin with, this game comes from a good pedigree, so you’re expecting good things. It’s a fantasy title, which should help in the effort to make a decent adaptation as people have been making wizards and warrior type games for as long as there have been video games. Plus, it was developed by Vivendi, who made some really good game adaptations of the Lord of the Rings movies. Unfortunately, in a rush to cash in on the pre-release buzz of the movie, the game shipped early, and you can clearly see it in the game play.

What probably doesn’t help gamers who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, is that the story is not that original to the fantasy realm. A farm boy discovers he has special powers, and it’s up to him to use those powers to save the world from certain doom. Take the same story line and insert The Force for magic, an X-Wing for a dragon, and R2-D2 for a dragon egg, and you have Star Wars: A New Hope.

Most of the combat in this game reminds me of 80’s side scrolling Double Dragon type fighting: Find opponent, hit opponent several times, he dies, and then move onto next opponent. Most of the games 18 levels are thankfully short, so it doesn’t quite seem like endless hack and slash, but it has all the boredom of button-mashing combat without the sweeping scope of an overwhelming opponent (aka Ninety-Nine Nights). You can fight with either a sword or bow (and as you progress through the game magic). There’s a poor check-and-balance solution to weapons combat: what the sword gives up in distance, the bow gives up in power. I can’t tell you how many arrows it takes to kill an enemy from long distances, because after a while I mostly stopped trying. What makes it worse is that combat also has some bugs. Sometimes you’ll be sword fighting, and find you simply can’t hit an opponent, no matter how many times you swing through it.

Once Eragon discovers his powers, he begins to develop his magic, and herein lies the only “fun” of the game (if you can call it that). From moving objects to the required magic arrows, magic is probably the best part of combat. There are some decent attack powers that allow the player to sling enemies about, or set them afire, and then laugh as they run stupidly off the edge of cliffs. While the results are decent, the whole of the magic system seems tired and trite.

Whereas a game like Gun was somewhat saved by its exciting mounted combat, Eragon takes what could have been the best part of the game and turns it into a flying hack and slash, using dragons breath and magic instead of bow and sword to dispatch enemies. It reminded me a lot of the flying in the N64 version of StarFox, except without creativity or excitement. Flying loops through a level fighting the same baddies over and over isn’t much fun.

I had hoped that with John Malkov...