Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

The Good
When I discovered that the Broken Sword series would go into its third iteration, I was enthusiastic, only to become depressed, once the game makers made clear that it wouldn't be a classic adventure.

So what did they deliver instead? It's a puzzle focused narrative with action elements. Sounds like they stuffed a lot into that one, eh? And you're right: The best about Broken Sword 3 is probably that it relies heavily on storytelling. It is one of the most intriguing plots within all games of the past few years.

Moreover, the graphics are quite good, while sound and voice acting is as professional as in the first two parts of the game.

The Bad
Broken Sword 3 changes camera angles quite often to push suspense. However, the controls react depending on the camera angle, not depending on the player. This can get quite on your nerves, because you have to rethink the direction controls all the time. And it will surely kill you a few times in time critical situations...

The puzzle design is usually logical and interesting, while not very hard. From time to time (and much too often) the game features box moving puzzles. These are clearly designed to stretch the overall playing time. Although in most cases you will be able to figure out how to solve these puzzles in a matter of seconds, you'll have to move boxes around for another five...

The Bottom Line
In the end, Broken Sword 3 is an interesting approach to renovate the adventure genre, blowing quite some dust of it. I'd love to see other games follow this approach with a strong narrative, good graphics and voice acting, thoughtful puzzles, but with better controls and fewer boxes.

The Good
The Sleeping Dragon is the third game of the successful Broken Sword series. It is a graphic adventure just like the first two games, but the game is combined with some action sequences, making this game better than the first two.

Vernon Blier, a young hacker, contacts Nico and tells her that he has decoded a document known as the Voynich Manuscript, which explains why many earthquakes have been occurring lately. And because of this, he believes that his life is now in danger. It turns out that he is right, because just before Nico enters his apartment, he is shot dead by someone. Now, the previous Broken Sword games have revolved around real-life ancient documents, but I believe that the Voynich Manuscript has nothing to do with earthquakes. Find out yourself by looking Voynich Manuscript up on Wikipedia and see how many instances of “earthquake” there is.

As I have just mentioned before, the game is entirely in 3D, and several locations that you visit such as the Congo, Paris, and Glastonbury are breathtaking. The buildings are well designed, with structures looking like they have been constructed a long time ago. I enjoyed walking around and seeing what's in each location, and talking to people along the way. The characters are well-drawn, especially George and Nico, as well as Beatrice, Blier's girlfriend, who just couldn't be any more sexier.

I like how the game gives you the ability to switch between the two characters; not at the same time, but on occasions. Like other games that I have played such as the last two games of the Gabriel Knight series, one character doesn't have to accomplish tasks that will help the other. George and Nico work independently as long as they are not together. Between the two characters, I found George's tasks rather interesting to accomplish.

You navigate George or Nico around and perform their actions only using the keyboard, but the controls are easy to learn. The arrow keys are used for walking around. I am familiar with this since I previously played Simon the Sorcerer 3D and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, with both games using the arrow keys for movement. The four action buttons in the bottom-right of the screen correspond with the W, A, S, and D keys; with the S key being the primary ones. The advantage of using the keyboard is that you can make the characters perform a new set of actions such as ducking, sneaking, climbing ladders, and pushing/pulling crates.

There is quite a bit of humor in the game. There is George's friend Harry (who flies his own plane in the middle of the storm on purpose) and the several disagreements between George and Nico with each other, but my personal favorite is George having to deal with the owner of the Cosmic Fairie - a shop that has nothing to do with fairies or the cosmos – and how said owner wrote a book that steals poetry from their artists.

What good is a Broken Sword game without a bit of suspense? Every once in a while, there is a an action sequence requiring you to tap one of the keys as quickly as you can or you die if you are not fast enough. But those action sequences are nothing compared to what you will experience at the end of the game. I won't tell you what it is, but it involves a sword and a little bit of timing.

Speaking of timing, it is essential to solve some of the puzzles. In (at least) two locations in the game, you need to watch the guards patrolling a particular area and make your move when they reach a certain spot. If you mis-time yourself, it is likely that you will die. But instead of seeing a death screen, the game automatically restores you to the point before your death, allowing you to rectify the situations. This saves you from hitting the Load button then selecting a save point. It is also much quicker this way. But not all the puzzles in the game require exact timing. The developers must have played Countdown and enjoyed the way that you have to get through the catacombs and solve the “wine puzzle” that opens a secret door, because near the middle of the game, that is exactly what you do.

The music is excellent, and it is on par with the first two Broken Sword games. The sound effects add to the realism of the game. You get to hear some background noise in every location that add atmosphere. For example, Nico browses the theater's exterior in Paris, and you can just hear the sound of passing traffic. I enjoyed the soundtrack that plays at the end credits. It is called Love Us by some UK group I don't know the name of, and it sounds much better than Happiness Is Inside Job which plays in Broken Sword II.

There is no disc swapping during the game. All that crap gets done during the installation process. The disc swapping that you did during the first two games gave me a headache as the CD-ROM drive was slow at the time. My current CD/DVD burner is faster now, so I didn't have to wait long for the next scene to load. I was halfway through the game then the CDs refuse to work for no reason, so I downloaded it via Steam. Ahh.. the joys of content delivery services.

The Bad
The Sleeping Dragon uses fixed-camera angles, which I found quite annoying. When I get the characters to move in a certain direction to the point where they get close to the edge of the screen, the camera angle suddenly changes, leading to confusion about which way to go. It would have been nice if the game allowed you to adjust camera angles.

It would also been nice if the game allowed you to put proper, meaningful descriptions for save games rather than “Congo 1”, “Glastonbury 2”, “Paris 3”, etc. And you can't even store as many save games as you like. I didn't want to overwrite my earliest saves from the beginning of the game.

The Bottom Line
Anyone who has already played the first two Broken Sword games may find it annoying that The Sleeping Dragon is only played with the keyboard. I, on the other hand, have played Simon3D, so I am used to the keyboard-only configuration. The game is entirely in 3D, and everything in the game looks amazing, ranging from the characters themselves to the locations, as well as the ancient buildings that lie within them. During the game, you get to hear real-life sound effects as you walk around. As well as the adventuring aspect of the game, there are some action sequences requiring quick reflexes to get through them.

Maybe the characters on the box cover wasn't a good move. The two characters on the front cover look nothing like George and Nico respectively, and on the back cover, the character on the right doesn't look like George's arch-nemesis – he actually looks more like Darkman. If only the person responsible for creating the covers actually drew properly.

The Good
In terms of presentation, this puzzle solving adventure is near flawless. The game has a bizarrely wonderful balance of gloss and quirkiness that really is like little else. Now, before I start proper, I'd like to say that I've never played the first or second Broken Sword games, so please don't expect any whining that this game isn't as good or whatever - I don't care how it compares to its peers. All I know is that regardless of what you might hear on Internet forums and fansites, this game stands up on its own merits.

The game is a fairly standard point and clicker, but with the pointing and clicking removed. Instead you wander merrily around the environments, with context-sensitive actions being offered when you stand near an object. These actions are mapped to the face buttons and are shown on screen in a small and discreet enough display. Ultimately, the results of this new-fangled control system are exactly the same as if you were using a pointer but its nice to see some innovation of a sort.

The game's key strength is its natural charm. Your heroes, the stereotypical yank George and refined, elegant and rather French Nico, are warm, funny, and are people you would genuinely want to meet in real life, at least compared with Duke Nukem or Master Chief. The villains are suitable menacing, and have enough personality to be satisfyingly nasty without being your typical 'evil mastermind' cut-out. They do get pretty close at times though!

The humour is what pulls the game through, with dialogue laugh-out-loud funny in places, and bit part characters overflowing with warm charm. You'll chuckle at a ridiculously idiotic police inspector, who cannot stop artfully walking round in circles. You'll smile at a poor guard besotted with Nico who distracts him as George sneaks round. And you'll guffaw as Nico wears a wig making her resemble the female antagonist, as guards you previously skulked past start wetting themselves as you walk past.

The game's graphics are wonderful. Revolution, the developers, are clearly against photo-realism and with good reason, and the characters have something of the comic book around them, which only helps to augment the game's comic charm and lift Broken Sword above your traditional, boring 'man-with-gun-in-enemy-base' action adventure. The puzzles are mainly excellent if basic, with some neat box-pushing that is really quite well done. And overall the game feels like a complete experience with its own distinct feel. Hardly a bad thing.

The Bad
Sadly the game has too many faults to stand as a truly great adventure. The lighthearted style can sometimes make cut-scenes desperately trying to be dramatic look silly and laughable. Also, the puzzles far too often are trial and error event sequences or worse have you despairing, trying every object in your inventory in the desperate hope of some obscure object working.

The plot is also a little predictable, with you working against the typical evil guy looking to salvage the power of the earth, in this case through 'dragon lines' located through a translated Voynich Manuscript (google it!). You sometimes feel a little like you want to progress to see George's next funny little outfit rather than to conclude the plot. The ending is also curiously understated with the final challenge being a bit of a let down, even if it is enjoyably silly.

The main game-breaker though is the loading screen. Not only is it boring and bland, it turns up far too often and for far too long. I estimate that you'll spend over a tenth of your time playing Broken Sword staring at the word 'Loading' and a slowly pulsing image that seems to have little in common with the actual game plot. One puzzle actually has a loading screen separating it in half, with it taking over a minute to move from one half to the other. Yes, it doesn't sound like much, but those minutes soon add up to a scary amount of time. In one instance picking up an item that created new dialogue choices needed a loading screen before I could quiz people with it. And every time you die in the game, no instant restart for you! No, its another loading screen for your pleasure.

And dying is something that'll happen an awful lot to you through two main causes. The first are quick time events (QTE). Players of Fahrenheit/The Indigo Prophecy and Resi 4 will be familiar with these button prompts guiding you through action sections. But in Broken Sword they only involve the 'x' button and simply have you prodding it when required, but won't count it if you bash it all the time. This has clearly been done to make the cut-scenes 'come to life', to make the players feel part of the action. A noble cause, but the QTEs are awful. They are one-button tests that are killed by unresponsive controls and a loading screen every single time you slow reactions slightly slower than a panther. Other action scenes have you running down corridors and are hardly exciting while punishing you for taking a route one pixel out of the 'racing line'. Not a good thing, and it only leads to a lot of loading times.

The other cause of frequent death are the stealth sections. These bits are really horrible, and nearly ruin the game. They're slow, boring and you feel about as sneaky as Oprah Winfrey trying to hide behind a street-light. Not a good thing! And every time you so much as breathe in the wrong direction, its instant death and another loading screen. Brilliant!

The Bottom Line
This game could have been really quite something, and in a way it is. Although the flaws are obvious, if you like its charm you'll play through as I did and you will really enjoy yourself. Hopefully the upcoming sequel (currently Windows only) will fix the problems and work with the strengths of this most curious title. Ultimately, this is little more than a flawed, if noble, experiment to liven up the adventure genre with action and stealth. But its real strength is the nostalgia of the proper puzzles and the excellence of the characters - everything it felt it had to make more exciting. Try this game - you might like it, you might not. But try it, because Revolution have created an adventure that might just hook you and would have ignoring flaws that in any other game would have you seething. Just bring a book to read for the loading, okay?