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 By Dale Farris,
Vice President
Golden Triangle PC Club
May 2004
Game Overview
The murder of an underground hacker in Paris is just the beginning of this
extraordinary adventure for George Stobbart and Nico Collard in the highly
anticipated Broken Sword III. Powerful seismic events are shaking the
world. An Ancient Conspiracy, the Secrets of the Templars, and a fiendish
source of pure Evil are responsible.
From the jungles of the Congo to the deceptive calm of the English West
Country and gothic castles – time is running out for the Earth and only
George and Nico can save it. Also available for Xbox.
Game Background
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is the third in a long successful
adventure game series that began in 1996 with Broken Sword: Shadow of the
Templars. The first, Templars game was a beautiful, animated 2D
mystery-adventure, and its storytelling, entertaining puzzles, good humor
and great good looks made it a legendary game. This first Broken Sword
game set a precedent in the saturated adventure game genre, with its
clearly superior design, plot, character development, dialogue, and game
play.
The second game in the series, Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror, was
perhaps not quite the classic game the first one was, but it was
nevertheless well-received. This third game in this clever adventure game
series, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, upholds this long established
Broken Sword tradition and will be a welcomed by all Broken Sword series
fans, as well as all adventure game fans.
Summary of Features
An epic narrative from Europe's master interactive storytellers -
Revolution Software
Stunning graphics delivered by a radical new graphic engine
Wholly intuitive direct control interface - fresh gameplay with keyboard
and mouse navigation for full control of the character
Movie quality script and voice acting, with facial animation choreographed
by Revolution's proprietary Virtual Actor Engine
A thrilling experience with realistic and unforgettable characters and
a compelling storyline
A mass appeal theme based on true historical events
Suspenseful storyline
Numerous puzzles of varying complexity - environmental, tactile, auditory
Gripping, graphical adventure that captures the imagination
Full-screen immersion in breathtaking graphics
Totally recreated settings in detail
Beautifully drawn backgrounds, objects, and characters
Interesting plot
Minimal inventory interface for objects to use
Aptly created sound effects and background score add impact
Game Play
The two heroes of the prior 2 Broken Sword games, George Stobbart and Nico
Collard, return in this 3rd game. Nico is still a Parisian newspaper
journalist, and George has been working as a patent attorney in Idaho. The
story begins as George is flying to a remote location in the Congo to meet
with a scientist about some patent work. The woefully inadequate plane
he’s in crashes, and the adventure begins.
The change this time around is that the game takes place in a 3D
environment. You move the characters using the 4 arrow keys, and there are a
cluster of four "action" keys mapped to the WASDX keyboard buttons. These
are also fully customizable. If you have an analog gamepad or a joystick,
the game will likely recognize these additional controllers, and the game
will provide you an option to control the characters with these other
input devices.
The use of the keyboard commands, along with the 4 arrow keys will
definitely require a bit of time to become accustomed to how the game
actually responds to these commands. I found the 4 arrow movement commands quite
awkward, and when the game ratchets up the tension requiring you to very
quickly hit the right keyboard key, this makes these cumbersome controls
even more tedious. When you press an arrow direction key, the character
moves accordingly, but not always in a straight line. You always have to
modify the movement a bit with another arrow key, in order to keep your
character moving where you want.
The game has many situations when you must enter the
correct keyboard command in literally a split second, or the character
will "die." Thankfully, the game takes your right back to the very point
when these timed keyboard commands begin, preventing you from having to
back-track through a lot of prior gameplay to get back to the tedious
point. These split-second commands can be overcome, but you may have to
try these a few times to finally get the right keyboard key pressed at the
right time, in order to further advance the game. The use of the joystick
or an analog gamepad should help eliminate these awkward keyboard
problems.
The inventory and conversation systems are also similar to the first two
games. The inventory is brought up at the tap of the spacebar button, and
inventory items can easily be used on the environment or combined with
each other. Conversation topics are noted by colorful icons. Also note
that in some of the game's many timed sequences, you will also have to
quickly open the inventory and quickly use the correct object, in order to
prevent your character from dying.
The game also uses "hot spots," or mapped areas of the screen, that open
up activity or interaction. As George or Nico move through the
environment, a bright little spark appears at any possible point of
interaction. The character's head will turn toward that object, and you
can use the PageUp or PageDown key to move the character's desired
interaction with various of these objects that may be "highlighted."
The game maintains your perspective in 3rd person, and you move the characters
all around and through the well designed 3D environments. As the
characters move, many times the game moves the backgrounds past you, giving
you a good sense of being immersed in the game's environments. Many of the
game's puzzles require you to use and manipulate objects to gain access.
There is also a lot of rock climbing, rail hanging, ledge crawling, along
with a lot of stealth movement using the Ctrl key.
You move the character until you see a "climb up" or "climb down" action
icon, although you cannot make the characters run and jump, as you can in
so many other 3rd person first person shooters. The camera is fixed at all
times and usually works very well. In fact, the camera placement and
movement often gives the game a wonderfully cinematic feel. This also does
prevent you from having to try these jumps over and over again, as the
game automatically makes the character successfully complete the jump when
you see this jump action icon.
Nico and George begin the game separately, and the story dovetails their
separate investigations as they move toward each other. Once they connect,
some sections of the game are played with them together and cooperating in
the puzzle solving, while other sections are played with each separate
character. Again, the game's awkward keyboard command scheme means you
have to figure out the correct sequence of the correct keyboard keys in
order to get the 2 characters to work together to solve a few of the
puzzles.
The story moves all over the world, from the Congo to England to Paris to
Prague, and even to Egypt.
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is a game with a lot of danger involved
for the characters, and you will likely often die. Thankfully, the game
restarts right before where you made your fatal error, and does not force
you to reload a saved game. The game will also let you save at most any
place in the game, except of course for the cinematics and the
pre-programmed action sequences.
There’s also a lot of stealth involved in the game, and it’s very nice to
see this element used well in an adventure game. Both George and Nico have
the ability to “creep” and hide in the shadows, which is often necessary
to avoid the nasty guards.
The graphics in the game are beautiful and reminds us of the detail found
in the first two games. The storytelling is easily on par with the first
two games, and the story is dramatic, funny, scary, intriguing, and full
of entertaining non-playable characters. The musical score is by Ben
McCullough, and it adds drama, mood, and atmosphere to the game.
The voice acting is superb, and does a good job of conveying the now
famous Broken Sword series characters. Rolf Saxon returns as George
Stobbart, and his performance is totally in-synch with the characters
slightly more grown-up persona. Sarah Crooke (an intern at Revolution who
convinced Cecil to let her audition) is terrific making her “Nico” debut.
The camera work is alternatively fascinating and frustrating. There are
brilliant moments, such as when you are edging George across a building
ledge and the camera slowly pans and zooms out in order to show us just
how perilous his situation is, and then gently zooms back in as George
reaches the other end without ever hampering your ability to maneuver
across. There are also an excessive amount of hard camera cuts that, for a
camera-relative control system, prove disorienting far too often, and in
more than one situation it is possible to get shot by a guard who you have
absolutely no way of seeing, because you can’t quite maneuver your
character in the right spot to trigger the hard cut that will show you the
guard. There’s also plenty of instances where you’re running northwest,
and just as you try to turn left—hard cut!, and suddenly your character is
running southeast and you’ve completely turned the wrong direction.
The game's beautiful design and attention to detail in the layouts are
even more impressive in this 3rd chapter of this series because you can
now move the characters through these environments. The game at times is
really dazzling, while the challenges include both puzzles to solve along
with key timed keyboard commands. The story line is quite complex and is
fully developed over time as you advance through the game.
The Puzzles
Broken Sword contains some refreshingly new puzzles, although most of the
puzzles involve finding ways into or out of certain places. The game also
has numerous puzzles that require you to move around crates in order to
allow the character to continue to move through the game. These crate
moving puzzles have been designed to not allow you to get hopelessly
stuck, forcing you to restart a saved game, but these do also get quite
tedious. Your character can only pull or push these crates, and you have
to plan in advance your sequence of crates to be moved in the correct
order, as the puzzles do not let you just pick up the crate and place it
where you want it. These require a lot of trial-and-error, and get more
complex toward the end of the game. In fact, at the nearly completed end
of the game, you find the most complex of all these crate moving puzzles,
which I found annoying.
The game also has one of those old chicken-and-fox transport puzzles,
where you have to figure out how to get 3 different types of characters
across a river, and you cannot allow the wrong combination of 2 of them to be together at one
time. You must make sure you have the correct 3rd person with one of
the other 2 in the boat at the same time. This puzzle forces you to make
the right sequence of 7 moves in order to move through the game. In
other situations, the game has necessary objects you have to find that are
occasionally very hard to locate.
About The Walkthrough Solution Guides
I urge anyone
interested in this neat game to also consider getting a copy of the
solutions guide. In this game, the guide will really come in handy,
because of the need to be sure to find all the NPCs and open up all the
dialogue, in order to open up other playable spots to advance the game. In
addition, the guide will also help with solving the game's more difficult
puzzles.
In my case, I always work with adventure games with the
official walkthrough, because I just do not have all the extra time to try
and puzzle out the correct combinations of either objects or puzzle
solutions. I just have too many other things to do.
In my situation, playing with a walkthrough means I can concentrate on
moving the game plot along, and most importantly, open up all the
wonderful scenes and action that the coders have worked so hard to include
in the game. Without a walkthrough, I just feel I am not getting my
money's worth out of the game. Also, I always appreciate having the help
to get through the game so I can savor all the impressive screens and
animated cut-scenes, as was the intent of the game creators.
What makes this issue even more relevant here is that DreamCatcher seems
to realize this, as evidenced by their always wise price points for their
games and their solution guides. You end up with a total investment that
means you will be better assured you can get through the game and not end
up spending an excessive amount of time with the game. So, no, I don't
think using a walkthrough solution guide is any indication of any lack of
skill or abilities, but instead, a more appropriate way to invest minimal
time with an adventure game, that ends up much more likely to be a fun experience.
Game Saves
You can save your game at any point, a feature always appreciated by
adventure gamers. In this game, you really should save often, because you
can indeed "die" in a few spots in the game.
Targeted Customers
With Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, the Adventure Company has produced an adventure game with a unique
storyline that
will appeal to all fans of the prior 2 titles in the Broken Sword series,
as well as all adventure gamers.
Install and Setup
The game should install and set up with no problems, and the game will
load about 1GB of data onto a machine. Also, the game disc does need to
be placed in the CD ROM drive in order to play the game. In addition, you
will be forced to enter the key data that comes with the game, or the game
will not load. Each time you start the game, you will have to wait for the
game's disk protection system to scan to find this keyed collection of
alpha-numeric characters. This took anywhere from 1 minute to over 5
minutes on my machine, and this delay may annoy some gamers.
Uninstalling the game involves the use of the games uninstall feature in
its folder on the Start, Programs menu.
I loaded the game on a Win XP Pro machine (P III-850, 256MB SDRAM) that had
a Creative Labs Annihilator 2, 32MB video card (an nVidia GeForce 2 GTS
board), and a Creative Labs Live X Gamer! sound board, and the latest drivers for each.
An HP CD RW 9200 drive
served as the CD ROM drive. The mouse and keyboard were both PS/2
connections. I also had already installed the DirectX 9 files. My machine also had an internal Zip
250 drive, standard floppy, one 8-port USB hub, a
Logitech Wingman Extreme joystick, standard microphone, Cambridge Soundworks DTS 2000 speaker system, and a NIC board connected to SW Bell's
DSL modem.
Note that this system is certainly not a high-end, state-of-the-art
configured system. If you have a higher end machine, with a better video
and sound card, more RAM, and a faster CPU, this game will definitely be
even more impressive. On my system, although the game did play, there was
noticeable blocking of the characters and the environments, as my video
card was not powerful enough to display the very rich, detailed
environments and character faces that high end systems will display.
Price
$39.99 (Super Bargain)
$ 9.99 the official strategy & solutions guide (a great bargain
also)
Minimum System Configuration Requirements
P-III 750MHz processor (P-III 1.2GHz recommended)
Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP
128MB RAM
1GB free hard disk space
DirectX 8.1 GeForce2 64MB video card
(GeForce4 Ti 4200 or equivalent recommended)
DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card and speakers
8x CD-ROM Drive
Keyboard controls
Supports analog gamepads and joysticks
If you run the game on a higher end system, you should not experience any
performance problems. In addition, the game will just be even more
impressive with a higher end video card and more RAM.
Note that this game is also available on the Xbox, and the controls will
likely be easier to command.
About The Adventure Company
The Adventure Company, a division of DreamCatcher, is a leading
publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment devoted exclusively
to releasing titles geared towards adventure gamers. The Adventure Company
is committed to publishing games that deliver maximum value on multiple
platforms including, PC, Playstation2 computer entertainment system,
GameCube, and Xbox.
About Dreamcatcher
The Adventure Company’s parent, Dreamcatcher, launched its first title in
1996, with a small band of people who believed in providing customers with
quality entertainment software at affordable prices. Since that time,
DreamCatcher has become one of the most successful small-sized publisher
in the entertainment software industry, and was the fastest growing
publisher in 2000, growing over 800% according to PC Data. DreamCatcher
Interactive was listed in Profitguide.com's article: Canada's Fastest
Growing Companies 2002, and ranked #5.
In 1996, DreamCatcher Interactive
launched their first title and since then, they have become a very
successful publisher in the computer game entertainment software industry.
In my opinion, one of this company's strongest assets is their dedication
to provide customers with high quality entertainment software at very affordable prices. Some of the best interactive computer games now on the
market come from DreamCatcher.
Bringing to market titles that are affordable, without jeopardizing
content quality, is another significant factor that helps distinguish this
company from the many that flood the market with countless game titles.
DreamCatcher thrives on innovative marketing strategies, solid retail and
developer partnerships, and on providing excellent customer support that
is well above industry standards.
A new partnership with Her Interactive has enabled DreamCatcher to now sell the
super games in the Nancy Drew series, including
Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill, Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger, and Nancy
Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion. Check this link to read a review of
these Nancy Drew
Interactive Mystery Adventure Games.
Dracula: The Resurrection and In Cold Blood are two current games for
the PC that will soon be released for the Playstation, and DreamCatcher
also plans to release more games in the future for the Playstation 2 and
the GameBoy Color platforms.
Necronomicon ($19.99) and The Legend of the Prophet and the Assassin ($19.99) are two of DreamCatcher's
newer games that should also prove to be successful titles in their long list of super adventure games.
Other super games from DreamCatcher Interactive include Traitor's Gate,
The Messenger, Riddle of the Sphinx, Jewels of the Oracle, Jewels II, Egypt 1156 B.C.,
Odyssey, TimeScape, Ancient Conquest, Beyond Time, Beyond Atlantis,
Lightbringer, Legend of Lotus Spring, Nightlong, Seven Games of the Soul
(also sold in Europe as Faust), SafeCracker, The Forgotten, The Sacred
Amulet, and Time Machine.
All these are similarly designed adventure games, and all are priced very
reasonably, the most expensive being $29.99 (In Cold Blood), with most
around $14.99, and many even priced at $9.99, which I think are super
prices for these super games. At the time of this writing, I have
purchased and played nearly all these games, and these reasonable price
points have always gotten my attention.
I think these affordable price points represent a very important
strategy of DreamCatcher that has helped them achieve their success. When
you consider the very expensive proposition to invest in the coding and
other very expensive costs to develop and produce a computer game today, I
think it is quite remarkable that this company markets their products at such a reasonable price.
I also think it is important to remember that DreamCatcher is still very
much in the business of producing quality computer games, something many
other companies can no longer attest to since they have gone out of business.
What is even more remarkable, in my opinion, is that at the time of this
writing, DreamCatcher Interactive remains wholly owned and
self-sufficient, and has not yet been absorbed by a larger company.
So, with the easy on the pocket-book price of the game, and the also minimal price of the solution guides, you have the makings of a winner in
the hotly contested battle for our limited disposable income and free time to
invest in playing computer games. DreamCatcher Interactive is certainly a company worth watching and supporting.
Contact Information
DreamCatcher
The Adventure Company
5000 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3H 5T5
info@dreamcatchergames.com
You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.
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Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon