Posted January 10, 2009
The Broken Sword series is probably one of the best adventure series out there. Wonderful atmosphere, memorable characters, beautiful locations, intricate plot and puzzles, puzzles, puzzles. The first Broken Sword was an excellent addition to the adventure genre, and the second lived up to its name and provided more of the same. But how does the third add up? Does adding a third dimension and changing the basic controls enhance or worsen the experience?
Well, yes and no.
(Word of warning; I might not remember some parts of the game very clearly - I played it through two times on the PC and the PS2, but it was some time ago, so don't go bashing if I spell something wrong or anything. :) )
Let's deal with the 'bad' parts first. Broken Sword is considered an adventure game. Point and click was the preferred method, and it worked as with any adventure game out there, and the decision to describe the topics in dialogue with images, not with words, was both economical and a nice touch. With The Sleeping Dragon, however, Revolution wanted to exchange the vivid 2D with vibrant 3D. At first, it isn't at all bad - the cartoonish look is still kept, and the animations are pretty fluid, and it runs on most low-level CPUs. The real problems start when our protagonist George needs to move.
After the (very exciting and humorous) opening cutscene, the player needs to guide George around a plane. A very *tight* plane. It wasn't a problem for me to figure out how to move in a tight space with fixed cameras, but I'm a console gamer, used to Resident Evil schemes, and those used to the PC keyboard might suffer. Strike that, will suffer. Because just when you think that the intro plane sequence is a minor design flaw (shouldn't it be more logical to have a wide open space to familiarize with the controls first?), the second change is apparent. Since the mouse cursor is basically not used, there is no standard point and click interaction - the ways to interact with the environment and items (examine, use, pick up, etc.) are all tied to a certain button at certain times. These buttons are always shown in the lower part of the screen. So, every time you think you need to do something, you need to check the button order to see what you need to press - because it can change (at least I remember so). For example, if you examine a door and notice there's something stuck in it, the examine button might change into 'pick up', or a different option might appear, but you could very well miss that. It's impractical.
Another thing that follows you throughout the whole game are boxes. Whole lots of them. There's lots of pulling, pushing, climbing, jumping on, jumping off, jumping over, and all of these actions require a button input, which is easily missed, because you are by default concentrated to the center of the screen. Half of the time I wondered why I was pushing the third box in a row in the last 10 minutes - it just felt completely unnecessary. Have the developers ran out of ideas? Who can say.
On a side note, I've heard of some nasty bugs and glitches in the PC version, but I haven't noticed anything that ruined the gameplay for me while I was playing. The PS2 version was laggy and full of loading times, but that is now beside the point. The point is, The Sleeping Dragon sometimes feels as an unfinished product. Thankfully, those times are scarce and not really noticeable for the casual or story-driven gamer.
This is where we get to the good stuff. When you disregard the dimension change and the controls, The Sleeping Dragon opens up to you. This is the first game where you play as our favorite French journalist Nicole Collard alongside the series' regular hero, George Stobbart. Mysteries are abound, death, intrigue, twist and turns, secret organizations, traps, you name it, the full adventure process. The story itself isn't completely original, but it doesn't try to be - it's reminiscent of Indiana Jones one time and Monkey Island at the next, mixed up with a familiar, yet somehow more serious attitude. The characters are lifelike and memorable, and the voice acting is consistent. The setting is still the essential Broken Sword mood, and nothing has actually been changed. If you liked the pace and atmosphere of the first two, you'll like this one as well. The dialogue topics are still presented as pictures, and flows well. The inventory has been changed to resemble the dialogue tree and also works.
Another addition are semi-interactive cutscenes that kick up the pace a bit and advance the story in a different direction. It's basically pressing the right button at the right moment. It's not too hard, but it might not suit your expectations if you played other games with similar elements (this *is* primarily an adventure game, after all). I like it, but this is one of those elements that are disputable - on a technical basis it's inconsistent with the majority of the game, but it's a nice change of pace after spending some time walking around and trying to figure out a puzzle.
Speaking of puzzles, The Sleeping Dragon is well-balanced. Every now and then there's a harder puzzle, but it usually means solving all of the rest of the puzzles scattered around the level, which often results in having the correct item(s) to proceed. Some might be a little bit hard to figure out just because of the tricky camera position or simply missing an element on the screen. (It's stupid to say, but pixel hunting might actually apply here...) All in all, none of them were boring and every puzzle connects certain elements of the current level in surprisingly effective ways.
Really, the best compliment an adventure game can get is that it has a great story - and The Sleeping Dragon fulfills that criteria. The rest depends on you - if you can get used to the gamepad controls (as I assume most of you on GOG are mainly PC users) and the sometimes clunky box puzzles, there is an entertaining several hours of gaming for you in this game, maybe even longer if you like to check every nook and cranny. Also, how can you not like the 'lawyer-that-can-never-sit-still-at-home' George and 'femme-fatale-sarcastic-AlloAllloaccent' Nicole? :D
Well, yes and no.
(Word of warning; I might not remember some parts of the game very clearly - I played it through two times on the PC and the PS2, but it was some time ago, so don't go bashing if I spell something wrong or anything. :) )
Let's deal with the 'bad' parts first. Broken Sword is considered an adventure game. Point and click was the preferred method, and it worked as with any adventure game out there, and the decision to describe the topics in dialogue with images, not with words, was both economical and a nice touch. With The Sleeping Dragon, however, Revolution wanted to exchange the vivid 2D with vibrant 3D. At first, it isn't at all bad - the cartoonish look is still kept, and the animations are pretty fluid, and it runs on most low-level CPUs. The real problems start when our protagonist George needs to move.
After the (very exciting and humorous) opening cutscene, the player needs to guide George around a plane. A very *tight* plane. It wasn't a problem for me to figure out how to move in a tight space with fixed cameras, but I'm a console gamer, used to Resident Evil schemes, and those used to the PC keyboard might suffer. Strike that, will suffer. Because just when you think that the intro plane sequence is a minor design flaw (shouldn't it be more logical to have a wide open space to familiarize with the controls first?), the second change is apparent. Since the mouse cursor is basically not used, there is no standard point and click interaction - the ways to interact with the environment and items (examine, use, pick up, etc.) are all tied to a certain button at certain times. These buttons are always shown in the lower part of the screen. So, every time you think you need to do something, you need to check the button order to see what you need to press - because it can change (at least I remember so). For example, if you examine a door and notice there's something stuck in it, the examine button might change into 'pick up', or a different option might appear, but you could very well miss that. It's impractical.
Another thing that follows you throughout the whole game are boxes. Whole lots of them. There's lots of pulling, pushing, climbing, jumping on, jumping off, jumping over, and all of these actions require a button input, which is easily missed, because you are by default concentrated to the center of the screen. Half of the time I wondered why I was pushing the third box in a row in the last 10 minutes - it just felt completely unnecessary. Have the developers ran out of ideas? Who can say.
On a side note, I've heard of some nasty bugs and glitches in the PC version, but I haven't noticed anything that ruined the gameplay for me while I was playing. The PS2 version was laggy and full of loading times, but that is now beside the point. The point is, The Sleeping Dragon sometimes feels as an unfinished product. Thankfully, those times are scarce and not really noticeable for the casual or story-driven gamer.
This is where we get to the good stuff. When you disregard the dimension change and the controls, The Sleeping Dragon opens up to you. This is the first game where you play as our favorite French journalist Nicole Collard alongside the series' regular hero, George Stobbart. Mysteries are abound, death, intrigue, twist and turns, secret organizations, traps, you name it, the full adventure process. The story itself isn't completely original, but it doesn't try to be - it's reminiscent of Indiana Jones one time and Monkey Island at the next, mixed up with a familiar, yet somehow more serious attitude. The characters are lifelike and memorable, and the voice acting is consistent. The setting is still the essential Broken Sword mood, and nothing has actually been changed. If you liked the pace and atmosphere of the first two, you'll like this one as well. The dialogue topics are still presented as pictures, and flows well. The inventory has been changed to resemble the dialogue tree and also works.
Another addition are semi-interactive cutscenes that kick up the pace a bit and advance the story in a different direction. It's basically pressing the right button at the right moment. It's not too hard, but it might not suit your expectations if you played other games with similar elements (this *is* primarily an adventure game, after all). I like it, but this is one of those elements that are disputable - on a technical basis it's inconsistent with the majority of the game, but it's a nice change of pace after spending some time walking around and trying to figure out a puzzle.
Speaking of puzzles, The Sleeping Dragon is well-balanced. Every now and then there's a harder puzzle, but it usually means solving all of the rest of the puzzles scattered around the level, which often results in having the correct item(s) to proceed. Some might be a little bit hard to figure out just because of the tricky camera position or simply missing an element on the screen. (It's stupid to say, but pixel hunting might actually apply here...) All in all, none of them were boring and every puzzle connects certain elements of the current level in surprisingly effective ways.
Really, the best compliment an adventure game can get is that it has a great story - and The Sleeping Dragon fulfills that criteria. The rest depends on you - if you can get used to the gamepad controls (as I assume most of you on GOG are mainly PC users) and the sometimes clunky box puzzles, there is an entertaining several hours of gaming for you in this game, maybe even longer if you like to check every nook and cranny. Also, how can you not like the 'lawyer-that-can-never-sit-still-at-home' George and 'femme-fatale-sarcastic-AlloAllloaccent' Nicole? :D