Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

"Wonderful Story Compensates for Uneven Gameplay"

After at least a year of waiting on my part, The Broken Sword series finally makes its next-gen debut in Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, moving to 3D with more realistic, better environments, and more diverse gameplay elements. While not all of these changes are welcome, the story, as always, creates a wonderful gaming experience that was well worth the wait.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, the Broken Sword games are essentially point-and-click, puzzle-solving adventures. You take your character from place to place, collecting objects, interacting with the environment and other characters in an attempt to solve puzzles that move the story forward. In my opinion, story and puzzles are the two most important features in a game of this genre, and gameplay controls ought to be as unobtrusive and convenient as possible to place the emphasis on the story.

BS:TSD accomplishes all of this, mostly. The story is excellent. While I don't do plot summary in reviews, it's enough to say that the story is basically a supernatural mystery building on many of the same issues that were covered in the previous game. The writers have used a very light touch and haven't gotten bogged down in material that could as easily be used for a grim dungeon-crawler. Everything is infused with humour as the corny-but-gallant George and his girlfriend, the affectionately sarcastic Nico bungle their way through the story. The story itself is enough to keep you interested throughout the game, and the ending pays off in a completely satisfying way. The story is as good as a videogame story can be, and deserves a rating of 10/10.

The change from 2D to 3D is most noticeable in the graphics. The environments that George and Nico find themselves in, Paris, Glastonbury and others, are done in a nice style that, while not even approaching photorealism, still give a compelling sense of place.

The problem with many 3D games modeled on real places is that they end up feeling like big, familiar-looking but empty rooms. There's a bit of this in places in the game, especially in the Glastonbury environment and the many closed (and locked) doors in the game that never open, but it never becomes disappointing. This is due mostly to the quality of the non-player characters that you meet in the environments, but also to a nifty gameplay element in which interactive objects twinkle a bit so that you're not continually searching pre-rendered walls and pushing buttons to see what interacts and what doesn't. The graphics are fabulous, and give the kind of ''armchair tourist'' experience that is, in my opinion, the point of making environments based on real places. The Graphics get a rating of 8/10, with the point knocked off for the emptiness of some of the environments and another for some framerate issues throughout the game.

The voice acting is perhaps the strongest point of the game. All the characters are extremely well-voiced and diverse. The script is strong, and the voice actors follow it marvelously. 10/10.

With all this going for it, some of the the gameplay is a bit of a disappointment. As noted above, I want gameplay in this sort of game to be unobtrusive so that I can concentrate on the story and the puzzles. In the early going, the game does pretty well at this, combining point-and-click gameplay with so-called ''action events'' in which you have a few seconds to figure out what to do and react in a situation. The ''action event'' parts seem a bit fiddly and often take two or three tries even when you know what you're supposed to do, because they're mostly tests of timing and it sometimes takes a couple of tries to get it right. The ''action events'', the control, and the basic object and NPC interaction elements of the gameplay work fine, and get a rating of 8/10.

The ''action events'' are tolerable, if a bit irritating at times, but the gameplay disappoints later in the game by introducing stealth elements in which you have to sneak past guards and relying too much on box-moving puzzles. There are three sneaking levels that are very much out of character with the rest of the game, and they are far and away the worst parts of the game. You try to sneak past the guards, get caught, and have to endure a 60-second wait while the environment loads again. There's very little way to find out whether a certain move will alert the guard or not except to try it, and what you end up with are segments of ''memory test'' gaming with each mistake punished by a 60-second wait while the game reloads. It's poorly designed, poorly executed, frustrating, and serves only to distract the player from the game's strengths of story and puzzle. These stealth gameplay elements have no place in this game, and receive a rating of 0/10.

Also irritating is the repeated use of ''move the box'' puzzles. We've seen enough of these in other games, they're not particularly fun to play, and although an attempt is made, there's not really enough of an advance on box puzzles we've seen in other games to justify the inclusion of so many in this game. I was left feeling that when the designers could be bothered to think up a puzzle, they thought up a great one but when they couldn't, they put in a box puzzle. Moving the boxes feels like filler, and also brings down the gameplay.

The game is also brought down a bit by the aforementioned slow load times and framerate issues. Oftentimes you'll have to cross a load point a couple of times in completing a single puzzle, and have to wait through a very slow (60 second) load time to continue, which breaks up the flow of the story and surely could've been better designed. The framerate issues are less noticable but still irritating.

However, I do recommend this game very highly. I enjoyed the story, liked playing through the game, and the irritating stealth elements were quickly forgotten. Given that it's the first 3D outing for the series, the faults are forgivable and one can only hope that we will get more adventures with George and Nico. The game didn't seem that long, but took about 15 hours to play.

This genre of game has been on the ''endangered species'' list for many years, and I hope that this game is able to keep the genre alive. As a fan of the genre, I'd recommend a buy on this reason alone, but a buy can also be justified by the length of the game: the game is too long to play on any rental shorter than a week, and it's not the kind of game that you want to rush through.

Overall, I'm pleased with BS:TSD, but fear that it might have sold well enough to justify its development costs. It satisfied most of my expectations, and were it not for the irritating gameplay elements and long load times I'd have given it a 10. Buy this game, play it, enjoy it, so it'll be a success and I'll get to play another Broken Sword game!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/04