nothing could prepare me for the huge let-down the fourth installment "Broken sword - The Angel of Death" is.
The game is just plain bad, with just the voice-acting and the well created characters to redeem it from total embarrassment; at first I was surprised to see that the mouse interface is back, in addition to the keyboard based one which was introduced in the third game (where it worked pretty well). the mouse based game-play work fine most of time, until the moment you realize you need pin-point accuracy just to talk to someone, not to mention the constant pixel searching every new area in the game, which can get you really frustrated in a matter of minutes.
as I said before, the only good thing about "The Angel of Death" is the voice acting. George is still witty, funny and well voiced, same as most of the supporting characters (especially the women).
During the game you encounter some reappearing characters from previous games, but none stick around for too long.
the game looks pretty decent for an adventure game, but nothing too flashy for a game released in 2006.
One last word about the many many puzzles in the game. most of them are quite good and challenging, although some are annoying in a major way, for example: hacking into secure computer system (which you do often in the game) with your PDA requires you to direct a "beam of data" using mirrors and pipes from one computer station to another, without setting of the alarm.
although not very long, the game takes forever to finish, during to the fact it is so damn boring. dialogue cant be skipped (even the lines you already heard) and you back-track way too often.
If you're not a die-hard fan of the series, I'd recommend you the skip this pointless game.
and if you are a fan of the series, don't even bother with the game... you'll just end up with the bitter taste of failure in your mouth.