The Bottom Line: Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon could've been the best adventure game of the decade. Unfortunately, obsolete interface and action sequences prevented that.
NetDanzr's Full Review: Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (Add on) for Win...
After breaking up with Nico, John has become a patent lawyer. When he flies to meet one of his clients, he crash-lands during a freak storm and finds the scientist he was supposed to meet killed. Nico, meanwhile, is still working as a journalist in Paris. Her boss isn’t too kind to her, though, and sends her to interview a nerdy hacker who claims that the world is about to end. She finds him killed and barely escapes with her own life.
This is how the third adventure of John and Nico begins. Those who haven’t played the first two may miss a few insider jokes, but even that wouldn’t prevent them from enjoying one of the best relationships in gaming. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an excellent game; an adventure every serious gamer was always dreaming of. For the most part, that is…
This title has all the important markings of a good adventure game: the story is very engaging, the characters are believable, puzzles for the most part are logical and fun to solve and most importantly, you’ll actually feel like you are adventuring. You’ll play both as John and Nico, just like in the previous games, but you’ll have a much greater freedom to move around, thanks to a new graphical engine. Instead of the cartoon-like animations of the first two parts, this game offers a 3D view, and in addition to walking and manipulating objects, your characters would sneak, climb and jump.
Overall, the graphical presentation is great. While it doesn’t reach the qualities of adventures like Syberia, this is mainly caused by the many close-ups on the characters, and not an inferior graphical engine. I personally prefer the close-ups, as it made me feel more like I was being the characters, and not only directing them around. The music and voiceovers match the graphics. For me, the first Broken Sword game set the standard for great voiceovers. This game matches these voiceovers, and even improves on them in the case of a few characters. The music is suitable for a big-budget movie, and completes the whole presentation package.
What makes the game, truly great, however, is the gameplay. The story is relatively long and quite unpredictable, especially for those who didn’t play the first game. It is further enhanced by some of the most believable characters I’ve ever seen in a computer game. Even people you meet for only one short conversation have very deep backgrounds, their own personalities and their own quirks you have to take into account. Whether the people defend the world from UFOs or shoot lightings from their fingers, they always make you believe that they could really exist.
Of course, no good adventure game could exist without puzzles, and here the game runs into some problems. While many puzzles are very logical and still quite challenging, there is an abundance of problems that will make you push boxes around. At times, it looks more like Sokoban in 3D than an adventure game. Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to see a Sokoban game based on this engine, but I’ve gotten this title as an adventure game, and so I expect a certain quality of puzzles.
That’s not the worst news, though. The game has been ported from the X-Box, and the interface reflects this. Instead of a point-and-click interface, you’ll have to use the cursor keys to move your characters. I found myself often running into walls or falling down holes, because as the camera changed, so did the direction of my movement, and unless I quickly switched to new keys, I was in trouble. This interface offers the possibility to climb and jump, and a few puzzles were based on it. The only redeeming quality of the controls is a long period of sneaking, which made me sweat for over an hour. All in all, however, the interface feels just like the one from old Sierra games from the time before a mouse became commonplace, and while it’s a nice kickback for veteran gamers, I don’t think we should be forced to use such an old-fashioned approach anymore.
Still, the worst news is yet to come. As almost every veteran adventure gamer will tell you, there is only one thing he or she hates more than getting run over by a car: action sequences in adventure games. Unfortunately, Broken Sword offers plenty of these, each more deadly than the last one. While some are rather straightforward, such as clicking on a certain icon as soon as a cutscene ends, others are more complex. In one scene, you’ll have to run through a winding tunnel. Unfortunately, as the camera changes you’ll run into walls and get caught and killed. It took me over an hour to complete this frustrating sequence. The final fight took me two days to complete, and I’m still surprised that my computer is still on one piece.
Overall, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon was a very pleasant surprise for me. However, the awesome story, well fleshed-out characters, great voiceovers, music and graphics are only part of the reason why I liked the game. I must admit that its predecessor, Broken Sword 2: Smoke and Mirrors was so disappointing that almost anything would be an improvement. Still, the game is far from perfect. The interface is awful, action sequences are frustrating and puzzles seem to be rushed. However, as long as you don’t expect a pure adventure game, you’ll have lots of fun with it.
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