Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

The Good
Growing up to become a fan of the series, I was waiting with extreme impatience to get to play this one. Screenshots were promising, story seemed to be moving towards the right direction, and after sleepless night over Gabriel Knight 3, I thought this one was going towards the right direction and if there's one adventure that'll seize up the throne, this'll be it. Alas, I was mistaken, as usually, you just don't know the game until you play it through. Maybe this'll teach me to lighten up my expectations next time around.

Okay, best thing first, it would be futile to say anything bad towards the game graphics, it's incredible. The lip-sync is too perfect, character models are detailed, textures are brilliantly hand-picked and level of details around you is astonishing, from objects to lighting effects. The music has a lot of potential too, but it's a bit scarce, most of time you won't hear it but only sounds. When you do hear it however, you'll know it's a trouble time.

That merciless killer, Petra... she's a real hottie, isn't she? ;)

The Bad
Now a line or two for disappointments. There's plenty of those, sadly. Story has a great potential and starts really intriguing, but it doesn't take too long before it rumbles down beneath its own potential by adding all kinda nonsense to the story, thus robbing a good detective adventure off its potential by turning it into psychotic fantasy with magic, and dragons and what all not.

Puzzles are not too hard, but there is far too much of crate pushing puzzles. Sure, they added option for that and now every other puzzle had to involve it. Also, it is annoying to make an adventure game where you can be killed all the time yet you have no way of returning fire. Yup, that's right, there will be badguys with rifles on every point you'll investigate and you'll have to be real quiet around them. That itself isn't a bad thing, but like with the crates, they used it far too much just because they had a code support for it.

Oh yeah, and that loading time is truely annoying thing. You must wait for like 20 seconds the least each time the game gets to load and it loads a plenty. I reckon that is not the case with PC version, but obviously with consoles it is a big thing. Sure, that's why you get all that great graphics to admire, but it is something I yet haven't encountered in games made for consoles. I mean, Xbox has a hard drive, they could've load a bunch of stuff if necessary there, or at least offer that option to save on loading.

The Bottom Line
A game that by no means may indicate to any flaw by its title and judging by the graphics, or whatever may be expected as a continuation to the series, but is actually a bit more than just an adventure. Now whether that is a good point or not, it's up to you to decide, but this game still has George and Nico, lets you play both characters, and had amazing graphics. You will return to visit certain places you saw in the past, get to meet recurring characters, and get a literal sequel to the original game... which in my opinion ruined it all the way it was done. This game showed a lot of promises at start, but more by more it ended couple of steps behind the prequels.