Across Age 2

Across Age 2 spends a lot of its time meandering. Most of the dialogue is superfluous waffle, rarely giving an insight either into the characters or the voluminous, nonsensical plot they're stumbling around in.

The gameplay is similar. You waddle around smooth-edged top-down retro dungeons, solving tiny puzzles and slicing and dicing your way through twirling bad guys who fire out bursts of magic or poke at you with the pointy bits at their corners.

It's all lovingly put together, but it feels directionless - a listless homage that adds little to the template it adheres to, and in doing so fails to match the games it's so obviously aping.

The game sees you adventuring through time, trying to right future wrongs by altering the path of the present. It's like Terminator but with more angst, spiky hair, and bizarrely attired Mage woman with depressingly heaving bosoms.

You troop around the dungeons in a pack of two, swapping between characters with the tap of a button. Different characters have different sets of powers, some of which work better on different monsters.

A joystick in the bottom-left corner moves you around, and a variety of buttons arranged around the edges let you fire out swords or magic bolts, lift things up, swap between characters, and change the your equipment.

It's all generic to the point of parody, full of squelchy enemies, fire spells, villages plagued by sudden monster invasions, and crystals that bestow magic power on anyone who gives them a quick poke.

It's not that the game isn't entertaining - it's that it lacks any identity of its own. You already know where it's going before it gets there, and the few surprises that it does throw in are too spaced out to really keep you interested.

There's a lack of scope, too. While the game wants to be epic, its attempts are thwarted by a minuscule cast of NPCs, and a world that feels like it's been plucked and pieced together from other more coherent universes to create a jumbled whole.

Still, there's a hefty chunk of game here, and anyone with a penchant for 16-bit JRPGs will find something to like in the mishmash of ideas. But the lack of drive is telling, and your attention will probably have wandered off well before the game's heroes have reached the conclusion.