Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

"Good or Bad? A hard choice..."

Broken Sword 1 and 2 were perfect games. Great dialogues where George Stobbart and Nicole Collard seemed to walk around in a world filled with irrational and hilarious people. A lot of humour and a spectacular mood seemed to give the games a magical aura. And the places they went to such as museums, caves, houses, hotels, pubs, jungles and so on were spectacularly detailed and amazing to look at. Add a spectacular score and you have two of the best games of all time.

Now, Broken Sword the sleeping dragon seems to have all the same things and not have them at the same time...

The Stobbart humour is different with cheaper jokes, the characters are no longer snotty French men, funny Caribbean fisherboys and Arabian kebab merchants but rather characters with a purpose: give the clues/objects.

The places they go to are similar(the French theater could very well be in one of the other BS's) but I think the 3d ruins the mood completely. Glastonbury and Paris look great in 3d but so did the Caribbean and Paris in 2d.

The story does not get as deep and complex as in the others, even though it had just as much potential.

The music is good, it fits the game well and it's very enjoyable. It wasn't as good as BS2 but the music in BS2 is very hard to beat, it's just amazing.

The puzzles are the weakest thing. The whole game would be better if the puzzles were. I don't know if adding more action scenes was meant to increase sales but I think the game would be a lot better with more complex and intelligent puzzle solving and less action.

All the Splinter Cell-like parts where you have to walk in the shadows to get in a castle would be more enjoyable if you had to persuade a guard to let you in or to go check something out while you slip something in his coffee. The crates are a horrible new feature and so are all the parts with platforms.

So, to sum up: Point and click and 2d were a great loss to the game and so was becoming more of an action game than the previous. It's also bad that the playable characters and NPCs lost their personality and the story could have been better explored. Overall, a good game but not as good as the previous.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/13/06