By Gary Kearney

Eragon the video game for the Xbox is based on the feature film and New York Times bestselling book of the same name. I have not read the book and at the moment I am writing this review the movie has yet to be released. I can say that I knew of the book about a boy and his dragon and it's youthful author Christopher Paolini. Much beyond that I was pretty much in the dark about it. What I do know is that more often than not games based on fantasy movies, or movies in general, lack the excitement of the source material. Is that the case here? Let's see...

In short the story is that an evil person has decided to wipe out all of the dragons and dragon riders in the land figuring that the world would be much easier to control that way. Luckily, or naturally, one of the dragon eggs survives and is found by an innocent country boy named Eragon, who thinks the blue egg is a rare jewel or something. Imagine his surprise when a baby dragon comes popping out! Eragon and his new dragon, which he names Saphira after her eyes I believe, hit it off very well and become best buddies while trying to save the world. Along the way they have a great adventure, meet strange new people, see odd new lands, and win the Super Bowl for the Miami Dolphins. Well, most of that they do anyway...

Sigh. Well I guess we should get this going. Eragon is average, maybe a bit below average. I “sigh” because the general gameplay is very similar to other “hack-n-slash” games, think of the Lord of the Rings games and you get the idea what is going on in Eragon, except not as well done...which is a little odd since Stormfront Studios was involved in both games. I suppose Eragon is missing heart, or passion, or something. All I know is that the game didn't do much for me where the similar LOTR games did. Maybe it's just a series of small things that added up throughout the game, that is not one single aspect of the game killed it but more like a slow death as the game went along.

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