When the director of the game your making comes out and says the genre your game is based on is dead, you’ve got a pretty hard sell a head of you.

Revolution Software were well renown for their clever and entertaining ‘point and click’ adventure titles “Lure of the Temptress” and “Beneath a Steel Sky” back in the day, but could they translate this across to the console generation which has been spoilt by progress?

Given the plethora of good action games on the Xbox, it takes something really special to stand out. For Broken Sword, the Sleeping Dragon, this comes in the form of a fantastic story line and excellent characterisation.

The storyline is deep, involving and interesting. The story begins with George Stobbart, an American patent lawyer, who is flying to meet a scientist who claims he has a machine that can create an unlimited source of energy in the Congo. When he gets there he finds the scientist dead, and thus begins his adventure chasing the perpetrator of the crime across the globe.

The game cuts to Nico Collard, a French journalist, who is invited to visit a local hacker who believes he can explain the reason for some weird environmental anomalies around the globe. She finds him murdered, and even worse, set up for it, and must go prove her innocence. George and Nico are old adventuring buddies, and it is no surprise that the two eventually hook up, and try to solve the deepening mysteries that surround their respective cases.

The story is helped along the way by the excellent voice acting and characterisation of George and Nico. These two characters are very well developed, very well rounded and it feels as if a real friendship exists between these two characters. A lot of other games, and even movies, could learn a lot from the character development within this game, as it is them main thing that drives the game. The secondary characters are a little more two dimensional, but seem more developed than in other games and the way Nico and George interact with them fully rounds out their characters.

The characters and story are central to the game, and whilst on the one hand this is good as it makes you want to play the game and find out more about the characters and unravel the mystery, on the other hand there’s very little else that makes the game stand out. The move to 3D has allowed the game to remove some of the infuriating frustrations of searching a screen with your mouse, but highlighted objects replace this. Interaction with objects is handled quite eloquently, with a simple yet effective on screen display showing you which controller buttons do what with the object, depending on whether you can use it, look at it or examine it. However, The highlighted objects make the game way too easy. There’s very little skill involved when you walk into an area and everything you need to either use or look at gets highlighted as you near it.

As with most adventure games, you can pick things up and put them into your inventory. Using the Black button accesses the inventory, and when you access a highlighted area, pressing the black button allows you to pull out an inventory item to interact with it. This is how a lot of the puzzles in the game work, and whilst many are logical, there are a few that will have you pulling out your hair in frustration. For example, there’s an elevator door you need to keep open. The big iron bar in your possession won’t work, but going through the inventory and trying everything until the bottle opener does is a little silly and not very logical. Inventory items also interact with other items, and there’s more than a few times you are required to combine two or more items to solve a puzzle.

Other puzzles involve moving crates around, or jumping sequences. These are generally no brainers, with the crates final position being fairly obvious, and the jumping involving pressing a single button at the edge of a cliff. There’s no timing or skill involved what so ever. There are a few timed events, requiring you to press a button at a certain time, much like Shenmue II, but it’s generally only one button press. These usually follow a cinematic, and often you are not prepared and will have to go through them again, which is annoying.

The artwork for the game is very impressive at first. The locations are all very colourful and detailed, but not interactive, apart from doors, most of which are locked and inaccessible. However, the camera is designed to create atmosphere by being stuck at certain angles, and this can lead to the frustration of wanting to look at something in the scenery but not being able to. There’s also a sense of sparseness to all the locations. There are no people populating the towns, apart from those essential to the quest. There are no animals or insects fluttering in the forest and other outdoor scenes. There’s no feeling that you’re in a living, breathing world.

This feeling is enhanced by the lack of music and atmospheric sound. Whilst the voice action is superb, the music seems to only plays when there’s something about to happen, and there’s little to no atmospheric sounds. The character models also suffer from weird glitches every now and then, and I found them to be rather devoid of expression, apart from in the cinematics. When you talk to a character, the models are all but stationary, with no real interaction or animation. This was quite a disappointment, especially given the excellent character development through the story, and I would have hoped this was backed up with a livelier world to put them in.

Conclusion:
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon tries to capture the spirit of ‘point and click’ adventures and port it to suit a console environment and gamer, and in some regards succeeds in doing so. The story, while involving, mainly because of the excellent character development, plays out quite linearly and this makes it feel as you’re playing an interactive movie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, yet still there’s that something missing, something that can’t quite hook the player as well the older 2D games, nor the new 3D action adventure games.

Pros:
+ Excellent character and deep story development
+ Good looking backdrops
+ A simple yet elegant and usable interface

Cons:
– Awkward camera
– The world seems sparse and lifeless.
– Some frustrating action sequences and simple puzzles that require trial and error rather than actual problem solving
– Perhaps a little too simple and linear

70/100