Great graphic adventure, poor conversion.
Broken Sword - The Shadow of the Templars, also known on the PC as The Circle of Blood. An early graphic point-and-click type adventure which, for the time, had a very innovative and immersive plot.
Brief Summary...
You are George Stobbart, of undetermined background, lightly trained in law and you can speak Latin when required. You are on vacation in Paris when you witness a devastating explosion inside a cafe, which causes the death of a man, and the only suspect is a clown, last seen entering the cafe with a "package".
Throughout the game it is your mission to find this unknown killer, and in your travels you get to meet a beautiful woman reporter, who is to quickly become your sidekick and possibly more... and you get to investigate and solve a bigger mystery which turns out to be the reason for the death of the man in the cafe at the beginning of the game.
This mystery involves the Knights Templar, and it will lead you to visit Spain, Ireland, Syria and Scotland, where you will find the various clues and objects that will lead you to your ultimate goal of finding The Broken Sword and the alleged treasure of the Knights Templar.
Gameplay...
Surprisingly good and intuitive for a point-and-click adventure, and the puzzles are reasonably well thought out, not too difficult if you keep notes on what happens earlier on in the game.
The backgrounds are as well presented as they can be for the limited quality that was available at the time, and the sound is very atmospheric with a well-placed music score that swells to a Crescendo at appropriate moments.
The voice acting is actually quite good and there is a sense of humour running right through the game which adds an enjoyable quality to the game, and the inter-play between George and the various characters is superb.
Controls...
The cursor will change from a hand to a beckoning hand when you need to walk to another area of the present screen, or when you need to use an exit. When you need to interract with something then the cursor will change to an animation of two gear-wheels turning.
Both the PC version and the PS version had mouse support (if you can still find a PS1 mouse these days...), and both buttons are used in the game. Right-click will get you a description of whatever the pointer is pointing at, and left-click will action something, such as picking something up or leaving an area.
The inventory is "auto-hidden" at the top of the screen and conversation options are revealed at the bottom when they are needed. The game is reasonably intelligent and will let you use inventory items with the main playing area.
If you use the controller, the L1/2 and R1/2 buttons can be used to speed up the cursor briefly, it is a little jerky but it does save time when navigating across the play area. Triangle and X jump the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen for inventory or conversation points, and Square and Circle buttons emulate left and right click mouse buttons.
That's about it as far as a brief description of the game goes, however the PS version has one thing that lets it down quite badly, and that is speed... or to put it more accurately a complete LACK of speed.
Now adventures aren't known for their fast-action, but I am not talking about that. I am also not talking about the speed of the plot or anything like that. I am talking about the speed at which the game plays... or doesn't in some cases.
This game got slated for being slow, and deservedly so in my humble opinion. Part of the blurb on the back of the box reads "... This is the culmination of over two years effort by a team of expert programmers and designers..." and I totally agree, they have done a superb job of making the game. It is not the original programming team's fault at all, they did excellent work on the game.
It's the CONVERSION team that should be shot! I wonder if they ever studied code optimization when they graduated, or if they ever studied the fine art of buffering. There is too much disk access, usually at critical moments when you need to be using the controller. When this happens the controller freezes out while the disk is being accessed and you usually end up having to replay something... LOTS of times! The end of the Syrian section is a classic example of this.
And the actual cursor speed is... laggy... when it isn't being halted by a disk access that is... and the over-all scene speed is slowed considerably when there are more than three or four animations going on at the same time, sometimes causing the entire screen to freeze briefly while the PS catches up on what is going on.
There is one consolation. If you play this on a PS2 you can select faster disk transfer speeds from the main PS2 Menu before you start the game. This helps quite a lot, but you will still get controller freeze-outs in busy parts of the game.
I have rated this game at 7.5, most of which is for the actual game content, and I really do like this game. But playing it on the PS platform is painful, even with a mouse. It appears to have been just ported straight across with no thought at all given to optimizing it for a slower CPU and smaller memory capacity.
If you like graphic adventures then you will like this one, but you WILL be put off by the painfully slow gameplay.