The 4th part in the original trilogy. And it shows. Broken Sword 4 seems to lack something, but it's still a great game.
Needless to say that once more you take on the role of George Stobbart and again you help him save the world from an ancient evil (so far so good as far as the fans are concerned). However, this time we meet George at a point in his life where he seems to have hit rock bottom. No longer a patent lawyer after the events of Broken Sword 3, due to bankruptcy of his firm, and unable to get another job as a lawyer because he’s been blacklisted, George has taken on the only job available to him at a bail bond agency. Although at an all-time low, George his life seems pretty calm… Until a beautiful woman visits him about an ancient manuscript and tells George that her life is in danger because of it. And now so is his as George will soon find out.
The game
The game compares best to part 3 in the series. This seems logical, since that game was in 3D as well, but there are some differences. The controls for example are different, but more on that later.
What I like to mention is that Charles really took to heart the comments that people gave on the previous Broken Sword game. This means that the crate puzzles are gone, with the exception of one or two of them and the same goes for the sneaking parts. Also, the split-second decisions have disappeared entirely, although there are some parts in the game where you have to perform certain actions in a set amount of time. But usually you have plenty of time to perform these actions, so don’t worry. It is just nice to see that creators of games actually listen to the fans when creating a sequel and you notice that this certainly has happened concerning Broken Sword 4.
Does this mean that everything about Broken Sword 4 is better than Broken Sword 3? No, certainly not. I must confess that I liked Broken Sword 3 more than I liked Broken Sword 4, although this is personal. Why? I will try to explain.
Primarily it comes down to the looks of the game. And I’m not so much talking about graphics. I’m talking about the impression that the game makes visually. What you notice immediately is that the game is more dark than its predecessors. The other Broken Sword games were always very colourful. Broken Sword 4 has a somewhat darker setting.
Also, the looks of the characters are somewhat different than that of Broken Sword 3, which makes sense, since the game is newer. But to be honest, I liked the George of Broken Sword 3 better. As did I like Nico better in Broken Sword 3.
I guess it all comes down to this: Broken Sword 1 and 2 had this cartoonish look. It’s what made them charming in my opinion. Since this cartoonish style looks very different in 3D, the developers abandoned this look somewhat in Broken Sword 3, but they still kept the colourful settings and looks of the characters, which I liked very much. The last remnants of these cartoonish looks seem to have disappeared entirely in the latest part, which is probably why I like the looks of this game somewhat less than its predecessors. But once again I would like to stress that this is personal and has nothing to do with a crappy look whatsoever, plus the fact that Charles has really listened to the fans, which I believe should really rule in favour of this game, even if you don’t like all the changes; at least they dared to take a change on the things that were received negatively in the previous part.
The setting of the story is pretty much what you’re used to. An ancient secret has fallen into the wrong hands and George must save the world from this ancient evil. There’s not much more to say about this, because if you’ve played the previous Broken Sword games, then you know what I mean and if you haven’t played the previous games, I have one advice for you: Do not start with this game. This game more or less requires you to know the characters and their backgrounds. Is the game unplayable without this knowledge? No, but you’ll sure miss out on a lot. For example, the return of Nico will make no sense whatsoever (although it doesn’t make many sense even if you know their backgrounds). So basically: play the previous games before playing this one.
And there’s one more thing I want to say about the game in general and that is that I found the story to be far less developed than the previous games. This may sound a bit harsh, but from the Broken Sword series we’ve come to expect pretty thorough stories, although I think that 99% of the fans of the series would agree with me when I say that Broken Sword 1 had the best story, followed by Broken Sword 2, Broken Sword 3 and now Broken Sword 4. It is not even the story itself that I do not like; on the contrary. Once more they have created a story with a proper background. But this time the game really seems to miss out on certain details. At some point there is even a small inconsistency concerning some happenings in the previous game. Granted, it is minor but it are those kind of things that can annoy a fan and I can certainly call myself a fan.
That said, it certainly doesn’t mean that the game isn’t worthwhile. In fact, I find it one of the best adventure games of 2006, but it just doesn’t live up to its predecessors in terms of story and details.
But let’s also take a look at the other aspects of the game.
The controls After a previous statement that Charles Cecil made, that ‘point & click is dead’, it is funny and admirable to see the return of point & click in this game. Fans made it clear that they did not all agree with this statement and once again, Charles listened to the fans, which meant the return of point & click in this game. Partly. Because you can still control the walking of the main character with the keyboard (which I did), but you can also choose to play the game with the mouse entirely. Whatever you choose, you’re going to need the mouse. There are however some issues which I must point out.
First of all, I did not think that the controls were optimal. Although the return of point & click in Broken Sword 4 was fun (and gave me some feelings of nostalgia; I know, I’m getting old), I handled myself better with the controls of Broken Sword 3, the controls which many fans found to be troublesome. With Broken Sword 3 I just found that the controls took some time getting used to, as I do with these controls, but after a while the controls of Broken Sword 3 felt more natural than the controls of Broken Sword 4 do. Maybe I did not like these controls so much because they did not feel that necessary. Usually, when you have point & click, this means that there will be al lot of clickable objects on which the main character will give you at least some comment. Those objects did not seem to be overly present. There were of course objects present (wouldn’t be much of a game without them), but if you compare those with the clickable objects from the first two games, then there are very few of them.
But the controls in general are okay. The inventory system is the same one that we know from part 1 and 2, which means that if you go to the top of the screen, you can see all items in you inventory. Furthermore, a right click on those items gives you a description of the object, while a left click lets you select it.
On the play screen itself the left mouse button will activate a default action that is programmed for that object (for example, a left click on a character will start a conversation with that character), while a right click opens up a mini-menu in which you can choose from several actions (for example: examine the object/character).
So the controls are once again pretty straightforward, although they may take some time getting used to. And although I encourage the return of the point & click option in the series, I feel that it is rather redundant in this game.
The graphics
I read somewhere that Broken Sword 3 had 2.000 polygons, where Broken Sword 4 uses 10.000 polygons. I’m not very technical with all that stuff, so I won’t go into it too much, but I do know that this means that Broken Sword 4 should therefore have far more detailed environments and characters. The environments looked somewhat more detailed, but to be honest I did not see a huge difference. And if I can be entirely honest: I do not understand why they simply did not reuse the engine from Broken Sword 3. Granted, that engine isn’t state of the art, but an adventure game engine hardly ever is and I think that the graphic differences between Broken Sword 3 and Broken Sword 4 are not that huge that an entirely new engine was needed. In fact, if the same engine would have been used, that would have saved a huge amount of the total budget for the game, which maybe could have been used to make a PS2/Xbox(360) version as well, as many of the fans would have liked. The fact that Broken Sword 4 uses 10.000 polygons apparently also made it impossible to make versions for these consoles, although that decision was made by THQ, not by the developers.
The sound
Once again George is voiced by Rolf Saxon. As we’ve come to expect this, because Rolf so far has done George’s voice in every Broken Sword game, fans are always very excited when they hear that Rolf has accepted the job once again. And for good reasons, because Rolf his voice just makes George. If anybody else would do it, the game just wouldn’t be the same.
However, the same cannot be said for Nico. She has had a different voice in each game and part 4 is not an exception. Personally I liked Nico’s voice in part 3 the best and was rather disappointed to hear her with a different voice this time. Not that the voice acting was bad (I cannot recall a character in the game with bad voice acting), but it was less than I had hoped.
Also the music is as good as we’ve come to expect from Revolution. This is a really good thing, because throughout the years, they’ve set pretty high standards for themselves with their previous Broken Sword games. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: music can, for a large part, make or break a game. In this case the music makes the game.
Overall
Although a very good game, I found this game to be the least compelling in the series. Graphics are good, sound is great and also the story isn’t that bad, apart from some loose ends. However throughout the years Revolution have set high standards for the Broken Sword series and somehow I feel like this part doesn’t quite live up to it. Having said that one should not forget that this game was created due to popular demand by the fans, which is of course great in itself. My advice would be that for a possible next part, Revolution should do the developing again themselves, because in my opinion that worked better than working with Sumo Digital to develop this game.
So it’s a nice game, but it is certainly not as great as the other parts in the series.