Unlike the apparent parity of sucky Star Trek movies, it appears that the even-numbered entries into the Broken Sword series suck. Just finished Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death. I finished it today, even though it just came out, because it's only about 6 hours of gameplay. Broken Sword 3 did a good job of pacing, and there was plenty of stuff to do. This game barely gets into the thick of things when it abruptly ends. The denouement is practically non-existent.
Puzzles in BS4 are pitiful. At one point you need to bridge a gap in the floor. The gap is so small that any human over 1 year old could just jump over, but whatever. There is a door on one side. What's the solution? Break the door down and use it as a bridge, right? No, you LOCK the door, and then kick down the BRICK FUCKING WALL that the door was in. Later on, you need to open a safe to get a valuable document out of it. The solution can't be to drop the safe into a huge blender, right? Because then, obviously, the document would get shredded. Not in this game! The document survives unharmed.
The interface is about the most awkward I've seen since Grim Fandango. Lord knows why the system from BS3 wasn't sufficient. They even opted not to include gamepad support, and the default key mappings are stupid. I judge how stupid an interface is by how many times my character runs into door jambs. George Stobbart had some bruised up knees by the time I was done with him. The game is also really ugly. Character expressions are actually much worse than they were in the previous installment. Nico looks like a god damn gorilla, with her lower jaw and mouth protruding.
Lots of dialogs repeat. No, you can't skip any dialog.
It's sad how much of a mishmash of other games this is---it borrows from dozens of games, but has no improvements to them and no ideas of its own. A bad attempt at historical fiction lifted from Gabriel Knight (out of the clear blue, near the end of the game, George "realizes" that a famous historical patriarch was actually an egyptian pharoah. It makes no sense at all.), wretched stealth puzzles from innumerable games, even a "hacking" idea taken from the little-known game Largo Winch. Maybe they thought we wouldn't notice.
All in all, BS4 is a sad cash-in on the good name of Broken Sword. It is marginally better than the atrocious Broken Sword 2: Smoking Mirror, but only marginally.
1 comment
Chi Chi
10/11/2006 at 10:05 PM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Hi,
First of all all I go from this web site was pretty kittys and something about dinosaures which i could care less about. I mean really, hello, thier dead. So are about a million viruses that make up your very own genome, do you care, NO. So moving on, i should let you know that I have supernatural powers. And, I'm sure, you get a ton of wako people emailing you.
But really, I'm here to tell you that you are here to change the world. When people have a bad day they might just blas the imconfused.net and they don't won't to read abou dino's. cat, no kitten pics okay cause thy make you smile, but really, what help is that. Lets inspire people, people. Lets let them know its okay to have a bad day. Lets give them some hope and guidance. what's worong with you people.