Cheap Broken Sword: Sleeping Dragon (Software) (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 98) Price

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Customer Reviews of Broken Sword: Sleeping Dragon

The puzzles start of absurdly easy, which was a bit of a worry, but thankfully became more challenging as the game went on. The story is intriguing (even if you are not particularly interested in the Knights Templar, it is a great murder-mystery), the graphics are beautiful and the characters are given voice by real actors.

(n.b. I played this on the PS2, but Amazon appears not to have a listing for that platform).

Great classic adventure with all new style
Broken Sword 3 takes the classic adventure gameplay of the first two games, and gives it a whole new slant by switching everything to 3D, and it works wonderfully for the most part. If you've played Grim Fandango, imagine a much-improved version of that engine, and you can picture what BS3 is like. Unlike in Grim Fandango, though, the controls here felt intuitive right from the beginning. I've read several reviews that complained about how cumbersome this game is, but I can't imagine what problems those people encountered. I'll be the first to admit that I'm lousy at handling anything other than the simplest interface when it comes to gaming, and BS3 just felt natural from the very first puzzle.
One thing I really enjoyed about BS3 is that it just felt more "adventurous" than most adventure games. This is due in part to the way you must perform Tomb Raider like maneuvers at certain points (shimmying along ledges, stacking crates, jumping gaps, etc.) Don't worry, though, it's still purely an adventure game, and you won't need to rely on twitch-reflexes to get through these portions of the game.
There are, however, a few sequences in which you will need some good reflexes. For the most part, these sequences play out like scenes from the classic laser-disc game Dragon's Lair, and it's merely a matter of moving in the right direction at the right time. If you screw it up, the game kindly lets you try again, even if you neglected to save recently.
Storywise, this one is pretty solid. There's a fairly complex plot involving the knights templar, and there are enough twists to keep you interested throughout. I liked the fact that George and Nico (the two playable protagonists) start out with seemingly unrelated storylines in different parts of the world, and it isn't until later that you realize how everything is connected. It's a good technique that's rarely (if ever) seen in games.
One word of caution-be sure to update your drivers before playing this. I couldn't get the game to load at all until I updated my sound and graphics drivers. However, once I did so, everything ran smoothly, and I didn't encounter any bugs at all, and that's a rare treat these days!

Disappointing but Good
I absolutely loved the first two games in the series, but in comparison, Sleeping Dragon is a huge step down.

For those unfamiliar with the first two games, Broken Sword is about an American man and French female encountering conspiracies involving secret societies that trace themselves back to the middle-ages (e.g. the Templars). The storylines are intelligent and exciting with roots in interesting historical facts and modern speculation, and the lead characters have well-developed personalities and witty dialogue. Overall, I consider this series better than Gabriel Knight, although this last installment is weaker than any of the Gabriel Knights.

The 3D graphics are nice, but I would have preferred more of an animated movie approach like the first two games, and a lot of what made the series special is missing. There is far less character interaction, which was one of the great strengths of the first two games. For example, in the first two games, if you presented any inventory item to most of the characters, they would have a specific, often hilarious, response to most of the items. Now George just makes some stock comment like "I decided not to" or "That did not seem appropriate". Also, while the new interface is easy to use, it also limits your choices of what actions to take. This results in the puzzles being far easier with the interface now often giving away what you need to do.

The puzzles in this third game are less interesting. The gameplay is more linear. The puzzles often consist of moving boxes around in order to climb to a specific spot, sneaking past guards with perfect timing, or pressing a button when the matching icon suddenly pops up on the screen in order to survive a timed puzzle (or else you get killed and you go through the whole long scene all over again with no option to skip dialogue). And there is a lot less interesting historical information or detective work involving tracking down info. The only scene which comes close to the first two games is the first time you spend in Glastonbury.

Still, Broken Sword holds up extremely well compared to the increasingly lame adventure game genre we are stuck with since Sierra and Lucas Arts have now abandoned the series which made them great in the first place.

The ending of the game fails to resolve everything within this lastest installment (e.g. why Petra claims to have met Nico before and hates her so much), let alone questions left over from the first two games (e.g. the comic relief tourists -- is the husband a CIA agent or not?). Which give me hope there will be a fourth game, although the series has always been referred to as a planned trilogy.