Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (2003)

I really tried to go through this game but i just couldn't, everything is terrible, the controls are horrible and clearly made for consoles even though i played the PC version, the story is uninteresting, the voice acting is cringy as all hell, the gameplay is incredibly dull and the puzzles are just terrible.

I rarely give up on a game but I played this one for 3 hours and decided life is too short to waste it on such a bad game, even though i loved the first two and want to try the rest of the series.

Truly disappointing.

Oh boy, now that’s a mixed bag if I ever saw one.

I’ll start this one from the end and the question of did I enjoyed it? And despite many flaws this game has I actually did quite a lot. The little bit cheesy but interesting story and well voiced acted witty dialog kept made the game enjoyable and worth playing.

The story is good and mostly interesting. Evolving around templars again with our heroes trying to save the world again. Along the way they’ll get to visit interesting locations around the world.

Broken Sword 3 is a victim of the 3D. There was a time in history when every game had to be 3D regardless if it was a right fit or not. And it definitely wasn’t in this case. The beautiful point and click was changed to 3D fixed camera “Alone in the Dark” like adventure / puzzle game.

Due to the shift to the 3D the game is ugly. The character models are somewhat ok, but the environments are terrible. Extremely blocky with ugly textures and dreadful lighting. As a lot of locations are in the night or in some form of cellar it’s even worse. Some of them painfully so.

Another problem the block puzzles. There’s just too much block pushing. At first it’s fine, it’s ok. You push some blocks to get someplace but when you’re doing it for the tenth time… So unnecessary.

The other puzzles are mostly fine and not as complex as in previous games which was fine. They’ve also added a few quick time event sections but what it meant was that you had to spot that in a prompt did highlight you had to press. Not really challenging but on the first one I died at least five times before figuring out what’s going on.

The controls are not the best. No point and clicking. Actually no mouse support at all. Everything is controlled with keyboard with a lot of key binds. Luckily I have a steam controller and there’s a great configuration available which makes it feel like this game was intended for a controller. But without it I imagine myself complaining a lot. Especially that the prompts for actions change a bit unexpectedly and while you can have one action available it can be bound to any of the four action keys.

There’s also completely unnecessary stealth elements that are both annoying and unnecessary. Clunky implementation and annoying save points make can test your patience.

One last thing I’ll mention will be the cook in prague speaking with scottish accent. Stuff of nightmares.