Broken Reality 2000

Less focused than the original: mechanics are not as well fleshed-out, the humor doesn't feel edgy anymore and the story lacks punch. It scratches the same itch, however, so I would be ambivalent. The tipping point is the buggy pathfinding.

I've been waiting for this game for years, so it's really hard for me to say, but at the current moment, this isn't worth picking up. The vibes from the first game are mostly there, though it has a real problem with inserting modern internet into the game (an entire level based around Crypto has zero place in a game centered around early 2000s internet nostalgia). A 3D exploration game without a jump button means any hole can lead to your character being stuck and needing to restart, losing progress because the game doesn't auto save. I got all the way to the final level and gave up due to the prevalent bugs leading to the game getting stuck mid-cutscene and losing an hour of progress. I really wanted to like this.

I absolutely love Broken Reality. Unfortunately, this game isn't it. It completely fails to capture the charm of the original and feels worse in almost every aspect. I tried really hard to push through and find some redeeming qualities, but ultimately it just falls flat. Characters have no personality, the writing is worse, almost all of the areas lack identity and blend together, exploration feels more tedious, the quests and 'puzzles' are just mindless, meaningless busy work to get you from point A to point B, and so much more. It really feels like a hollow shell compared to the first game. Really sad it turned out this way. I truly wanted to like this game even half as much as I liked the first, but I can't recommend this one at all.

As great as the first one, achievements are a great addition. Hoverboard should be bound to shift instead of an item you have to select. 8/10

the best way to describe this game is overstaying its welcome everything about the game is just not as interesting as the original, the ads aren't as funny and there nearly isn't as many interesting npcs which i thought were the main draw of the game in the first place some areas like the jungle and mines are just completely void of any npc interactions at all throughout the areas and just filled with the same repetitive quests and ♥♥♥♥, like shooting targets and drones? good! the game will make you so damn tired of it!!! the level and puzzle design varies from mediocre to downright awful, some of the later "puzzles" with the connecting the dot hacking minigame is just having the game hide the last dot for you so you have to look around for 5 minutes with a green filter over everything, feel my brain getting roasted so hard it has grill marks it's hard to believe the game is even made by the same people with how unfunny and uninteresting so much of the game is and on top of all of that the game is so damn buggy and unpolished its practically unplayable, the amount of times i got stuck or softlocked an area is so damn much that im surprised i even was able to finish the game heres only a few of the bugs i encountered: certain enemy bugs that you're supposed to kill bugged and some areas were permanently closed for me, and locked me out of some areas various times getting stuck on geometry before they added the unstuck button getting stuck in a wall and the unstuck button doing jack and ♥♥♥♥ lots of boundary breaking to the point where i can even tell what some puzzle answers were or even the order i was supposed to do anything in the FINAL area the last credit machine didnt work and locked me out of the ending and i only fixed this because of ANOTHER bug where they didn't properly get rid of my items and just made them invisible instead feels like the game tried to focus more on gameplay than on yknow fun npcs and gimmicks, but then didn't make the gameplay varied enough so they stretched it through the entire game with uninteresting to awful level and puzzle design, just have no idea how this game ended up like this

I typically don't make reviews as long as this, and honestly spending my time writing a review this long is already insane in of itself. But holy moley what a let down. First I just want to say that the graphics and the music are both amazing. That being said, I am sorely disappointed. I mean come on, 8 years to make the sequel of an amazing game, and this is the end result? This is a buggy, vast, boring, and repetitive game that has the original outshining every single characteristic. You would think that a sequel aims to improve on the first game, but whatever. I played this game and had fun make no mistake, but it felt like I was trying to force myself to have fun simply because it's the sequel to Broken Reality, one of my most favourite games, more so than organically finding aspects of the game fun. I mean dude, you legit copied Domo Paradisso (Minami Beach) and Geocity (Grifton) as settings and called them different names, with basically nothing new quest wise (they straight up redid the police mission from Geocity in Grifton, except its 100 times more broken because the drones are at head height, have fun bumping into them). If you have any doubt that they didn't know what to do for Minami Beach that they haven't already done with Domo in the first game, see how you get the katana. The name "Broken Reality 2000" is a misnomer, because the only Y2K aspects of this game are the graphics, which are one of the only redeeming qualities about this game unfortunately. The game has modern Web 3.0 things in it, and frankly the only area that even gives a Y2K vibe in full is the museum. I agree with the other reviewers in the game's misunderstanding of what it's trying to be, because I have no idea what the game is trying to be either. The puzzles suck, they are braindead easy, and they typically fall under either a fetch quest, a "press this button" or "shoot/kill this thing" type quest. Ignore the fact that there about a million other things you could have done for a puzzle (shooting at targets is not variety if you do it 3 different times in very out of place areas). And don't get me started on the Crypts, you have the EXACT SAME QUEST of fetching dynamite over and over, and the game has the gall to be self aware about it, meaning they knew it was repetitive, but didn't care enough to fix it (8 year development time btw). You can tell the Crypts was done last minute, because there's 2 very linear quest lines, one of them I just mentioned is fetching dynamite for different bots, and the other is fetching bots (yes really). Regarding the items, the new combat system was interesting, but the whole diagonal strike for the katana is really awkward to use, but it isn't too bad of an idea. That being said, the katana's combat system is used for either virus popups or the only harmful enemy in the game, these faces that every now and then require a specific type of katana move (the game either rarely or never gave you one with the diagonal strike, because they knew that the diagonal strike was too awkward to fight with). Again, disappointing. I'll say that the bow is actually a really good addition to the game, and is the only actually well made AND well used new mechanic of the game (the hoverboard exists for the Mall and the occasional water blocking your path, and then it exists to excuse the large and empty areas of the game). I saw some of the reviewers say that the humour was "safe" or that it was "dated". Frankly, I enjoyed the humour for what it is, and it's pretty funny (atleast, I hope that some of it was ironic because ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ was it dated). I don't really care if the game is funny or not, just have it actually be fun and have it feel like some level of attention was put into it. With this game, it felt like the most bare minimum of attention (8 years of development...) was actually used to get this game out. Not to mention it got delayed. The fact that this game is coming out to VR stinks honestly, because the worst part about this game is just how vast and empty it feels, maybe it's to have it run on VR? If a game has to compromise in order to run on VR, a still very exclusive thing to have, then don't even bother making it VR. The game has a bug issue, it doesn't make the game unplayable by any means, but they're still there, and I found myself sequence breaking more times than I should have. The biggest one is by far the huge memory leak problem that occurs if you leave the game AFK for too long, good luck walking to a save point with that 0.5 FPS. The game is getting more and more stable with each update, but if you release the game buggy and then release patches for it not even a week later, maybe try playtesting a little rather than going straight to the community, on release no less (also I love how they artifically upped the speed for the Nexus in an update because the area was just so vast and empty that it was a slog to get from one end to the other LOL). On that note, they didn't playtest the Cloud, sequence breaking and shortcuts are very prevalent there, and its the final area of the game, you'd think they would playtest it (if they did, I couldn't tell!) The ending of the game was very shallow and disappointing, it was[spoiler] the EXACT same message that the first game had, and it says nothing new, except now I know that "ERROR" and "Oneechan" were friends (I think?), characters who I have had the least actual interaction within the game, I am now supposed to care about. I cared more about the two toxic spiderman brothers or whatever reconciling. Also I found it funny how just, everything gets resolved in the True Ending, no reasoning, everyone is just happy??? Like sure, I love a good ending, but make me understand WHY that ending is deserved.[/spoiler] I don't see this game, nor the one before it as a period piece, I see it as a game to have fun with. If I have to tell myself "is this over" during a game, you have failed in doing that. What a shame. I worry for Broken Reality 3D (just let this series be if this what you do with 8 years).

I loved broken reality 1. and this game has promise. but good god this game is not setup to work with a controller. the button bindings displayed for basic tools like the camera are incorrect and i can't play for more than 10 minutes without getting soft-locked into a dialogue that won't respond to button presses. if they can fix that soft-lock bug I'd love to give it another try, but this bug has been present since launch and it hasn't been fixed more than a month later, so i'm losing hope it'll actually happen.

It's hard to believe the original Broken Reality came out all the way back in 2018, as soon as i saw it i knew it would be the type of game that i would love, and i did. It became something of an obsession of mine, and it's one of the few singleplayer linear games i've done multiple playthroughs of, sheerly for the joy of experiencing it again. It's a game that was with me through difficult times in my life, and even now it's surprising me in different ways. So when Broken Reality 2000 finally came out, needless to say but i was looking forwards to it. But after playing through it, even 100%ing the game, i can't help but feel that Broken Reality 2000 is just... Not nearly as unique or memorable as the original. Just to make sure it was not just nostalgia speaking i even replayed the original Broken Reality after completing 2000 to compare it, and while there are certainly some lingering issues with that original game, to me at least it still far outshines this as a sequel. First off, the story. While the original Broken Realitys story was never clear cut, you needed to do a bit of digging and interpretation to put together alot of it, the main theming was obvious. It is a story about letting go of the past. 2000s story, really does not do much, or really anything to change that up. In fact it shares alot of the same Characters and essentially the same plotline as the original. Is the game a sequel? A prequel? It is not really made clear. And while you can pick up some clues over the course of the game, it's even more bague then the original. According to one of the devs this is at least partially intentional, "it's up to you to decide!", essentially. But to me that's just not a satisfying answer. The endings between the two games is night and day to me as well, i will not spoiler things to much but BAE playing during the end sequence of the original game still lives in my mind even now. Second is the gameplay. And despite it taking me probably twice the time it took for me to beat the original game, 2000 feels it's half the game. This game has probably double the amount of areas as the original, each of which is then double the size of each of the originals regions. Despite that none of them feel quite as memorable. Most areas are so big that the game gives you an item that lets you move super fast halfway through it so you're not just walking around everywhere incredibly slowly, especially as the game expects you to move through the various regions of the game throughout it, compared to the first game where you can get almost everything done in a region as soon as you reach it. This game has you doing ALOT of fetch quests for NPCs, collect 3 bundles of dynamite, collect 3 keycodes, collect food for these people. And while yes there were a few quests like this in the original game it is ALOT more prevelent here. Third and arguably the most important in a game like this, music and graphic style. The original Broken Realitys style and music was unmatched, it truly felt like it near perfectly encapsulated the Vaporwave aesthetic it was going for. It had an incredible mixture of original music and songs from well known Vaporwave artist staples like death's dynamic shroud, BROKEN_CANYON and CYBEREALITY, each of which helped add to the themes and style the game was trying to convey. That combined with the incredible graphic style of the game, with each regions styling tying into the Vaporwave aesthetic and the digital stylisation made every area memorable and beautiful. 2000 however, with its seeming Y2K styling does not really land in the same way. Comparing areas like Grifton and GEOCITY or Domo Paridiso and Minami Beach, which in theory are very similar, two being cities and two being beaches respectively, the ones from the original game are so much better once you get a closer look. The more wonky and broken textures of the original Broken Reality, which often used real world images made heavily pixelated, more flat imaging and incorporating digital symbols and computer hardware into the world design really gave the idea that this game took place in an old and fading digital world far past its prime. Comparing that to 2000 with its much cleaner, sleeker texturing and softer edges, it doesn't give the same feeling of a digital world past its prime, it does not feel like a "Broken Reality", but rather a shiny clean new one. The music as well, for the life of me i cannot remember a single track from Broken Reality 2000, while many from the original still live in my mind. Kind of a combination of both story and style, this game feels uniquely bitter and spiteful in a way the original did not, it has many references to things like crypto, AI art, nfts, hustle culture, acab, alpha males, influencers, streaming and podcasters all of which feels out of place in what's meant to be a game about Y2K stuff, especially since half of them already feel outdated. The original game had plenty of references to memes and pop culture of the time but none of them tied into the actual story of the game as heavily nor did it feel as mean spirited as it often does here. In the end i cannot say i hate Broken Reality 2000, just that i feel i cannot love it in the same way i did the original. If you haven't played the first, go get it, give it a try, maybe if you REALLY love it, give this a go after. Otherwise i don't think i can really suggest this.