One more time George Stobbart and Nico Collard must travel the world, wrestling danger and piecing together the clues that will unravel the secrets of the Sleeping Dragon.
They are drawn into a terrifying conspiracy to harness on an ancient power. Brought together by fate, coincidence and the intri...
One more time George Stobbart and Nico Collard must travel the world, wrestling danger and piecing together the clues that will unravel the secrets of the Sleeping Dragon.
They are drawn into a terrifying conspiracy to harness on an ancient power. Brought together by fate, coincidence and the intriguing mystery, they will fight sinister forces, uncover an ancient conspiracy, and discover a fiendish source of pure evil.
Lured into the steamy jungles of the Congo, eerie castles in Prague, the chick back-streets of Paris and the historic English village of Glastonbury, the duo must unravel the mystery involving the 'Voynich Manuscript' which holed the secrets of the ultimate evil power, The Sleeping Dragon and save the mankind.
From the creators of Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky goes the Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, the third installment in the Broken Sword series.
You can check the sample of the guide on our forum
This is full "talkie" version of the game. You can turn the subtitles on if you prefer subtitled version.
Play as both George Stobbart and Nicole Collard
A sophisticated story based upon real myths
Challenging puzzles mixed in with very believable detective work
Fisrt of all, I'm a fan of the Series BUT BS3 is miles away from his predecessors in many ways.
1. It's not a Point and Click Adventure. Instead you have to use the Keyboard/Gamepad and the controls are not that good.
2. In the early 2000, evrey Game Conpany thought, everything must be in 3D now. Wrong!
3. Put 1. and 2. together. The Result: It became some sort of an action game. Yes! That's what everyone wanted how played BS 1 & 2.
4. OMG. there Faces! Instead of programming/designing the whole face, they did only half and mirrored it.
The only thing thats good is the story itself. It's not enjoyable when you have to run from someone and don't get to see were you going because the Camera is facing you and not what is in front.
As much as I liked the first two games of the series, I can't deny the fact that The Sleeping Dragon was a huge disappointment. It's like in everything the developers have taken a step or two backwards. I believe Charles Cecils idea was to bring classic adventure games to the present day and make them more appealing for gamers who find p&c- games too hard. Didn't work.
So what he did, he ripped mouse-driven controls off, and replaced them with crappy keyboard only-controls. Combine that with switching camera-angels and 3D environments and you have a mess on your hands. Ok, in the end the controls work almost decently, but still my poor keyboard took too many angry punches from me. And not because of the puzzles.
Talking about the puzzles. They do still exist, but in many places they've been altered to look more "exiting" and "dynamic". So now you have to push square boxes all the time to cross something like a meter-high obstacle. Without exception these puzzles are really, really easy, and I got really pissed when it took more time to push the boxes in place than to solve the problem.
In 3D-world some puzzles are of course about jumping. Same problem as with the boxes, the puzzle is easy, but getting to the destination takes forever. Jumping and climbing is clumsy, completely automated and painfully slow. You walk forward, push a button, watch a clumsy animation and repeat for X-times.
In the beginning the storyline is good, but as time goes on it falls to the kind of unnatural end of the world-thing that I don't personally like very much. In the end I was like "Meh, that's just sad".
For the fans of the series BS3 is worth playing, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone else. If you are looking for a good 3D puzzle-point&click-adventure, play Gabriel Knight 3.
Not even half as good as the brilliant original Shadow of the Templars and its successor Smoking Mirror, but it's not that bad. It shouldn't have been marketed as a Broken Sword title, because expectations went through the roof and they didn't even try to live up to them. They just changed the entire franchise. They even mocked it.
The puzzles are extremely easy.
The box, platform and action sequences provide an unwelcome change to the series as a whole, but within this game that has close to zero challenges they provide some welcome variation. My verdict on the box puzzles is that they don't fit in the franchise, but in any other game within another franchise I wouldn't have found them tiresome.
The stealth sequences are ridiculous given guards can't see further than 2 meters away in well-lit spaces.
There's a riddle in the game about crossing a river that's as old as sliced bread, which shows how out of ideas the developers must have been.
In short, this game tried to expand on the original Broken Sword experiences and fell short. The story is a joke, full of gaps and holes, and a truly ridiculous ending to boot.
The only good stuff are the return of George Stobbart's voice actor, and some references to the earlier games such as the return to Montfaucon. The workman and the nobel prize winner returning would normally have been welcomed, sadly the characters have been raped.
Disregarding all that, I did finish it without getting bored too much. Mildly entertaining if you're willing to forget they raped your probably favorite video game franchise (as it is in my case).
Great adventure games are all about an underlying story, event triggers that are not too ridiculous and puzzles that are neither trivial nor agonizingly difficult. The Broken Sword series, of which I have played parts 1 through 3, is not as good as my favourites Tex Murphy and Gabriel Knight, but not bad. But the first two are, in my mind, superior, despite the "old" graphics.
Part 3 is, I think, an attempt to modernize the graphics that sacrificed the playability. Today, it does no longer look modern. Constantly having to change arrow keys when moving around depending on the point-of-view is frustrating. When looking for clues, there are an awful lot of locked doors that have to be tried. The physionomy of the female characters, including that of main protagonist Nico Collard, does little to change the perception that adventure gamers are pathetic little men who do not spend a lot of time outdoors. (The fact that the opening segment includes just such a man is a bit refreshing, though.)
What I found most irritating, however, is the fact that as long as you ask everyone you meet about everything, the story moves forward. It's almost like watching a cartoon, except with a few keystrokes now and again. The puzzles are few and far between and not really challenging.
The constant references to, in particular, Part 1 may be confusing to a player who starts with Part 3; it's hard to say. I played Part 2 first, and even the few references to the first episode it containted made me wonder if I was missing anything.
I suppose it is the nature of the series, but all Broken Sword games I have played have the exact same story: mystical natural forces are about to be let loose by a secretive society, and you must stop them. In Parts 1 and 3 it is even (roughly) the same society. (That is not really a spoiler.) The main characters, George and Nico, could have been used in other settings, evolving the characters and their relationship. As it is, it's deja vú all over again.
I enjoyed playing this game. The story is good, the atmosphere is still quite "broken sword like", even though it is 3D you still feel like in a broken sword game.
The riddles are not too hard and most times logic, with some few exceptions where you have to try the same action another time or you think you already tried, but just another type of action is needed (like the view action instead of the use action).
The graphics are, for that time, partly quite nice, party a bit boring .. one reason, why I only give 4 stars.
The controls are really a bit annoying, but I was getting used to after a while. If you can use a game controller - use it, it will make controlling the game more easy.
It has been ported from the PS console, changing it to point&click or another interface type would cost too much, I guess. So they mapped the gamepad controls to the keyboard, which really needs some time to get used to. But apart from some few scenes, where the right timing is needed, you don't have to rush, so controlling the game with the keyboard feels okay after a while.
The voices and music are typical "broken sword", which both will give you a bit of a classic feeling.
All in all I liked the game, and would even give it 5 stars, if there would not be the bad controls and partly not so nice graphics.
For me it was about 17 hours of fun and solving puzzles, as I basically did not use any walkthrough. Using a walkthrough you will finish the game much faster for sure. But it's all solvable. If you just stay patient and trying different things you can solve them all without having to use a solution.
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