Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death (2006)

After finishing Broken Sword 4, it left me with a strange sensation. On one hand, I liked the puzzles and the control a lot more. Moving away from the mobile phone-esque block puzzles that BS3 had was really appreciated, but for me the game sort of dropped the ball on the story. It tried it's best to be like the first Broken Sword, it had the meeting between two strangers in unusual circumstances, it had the manuscript that needed to be deciphered, it had the fake villain, but it lacked the charm that the first one had. Well, it lacked Nico for most of it, so that may have been it. There was also a very big lack of Paris, and a proper ending for that matter. Much like the third game, Broken Sword 4 had it's ups and downs. Hopefully, if they ever make another game, and if it's not a 2D hand drawn adventure, it will have the gameplay of BS4, but a story more in the lines of BS3.

A lot of people didn't care for the transition from David Gibbon's wonderful 2D art to standard polygonal 3D for the Broken Sword series and that is fair enough. But realistically it had to happen as 2D animation becomes extremely costly at higher resolutions. Taking that into account, lets focus on the game itself here. The Angel of Death is probably the most serious and religion orientated story in a Broken Sword game yet, and it's overall approach is definitely less campy than 3. This is more played as a thriller but with the laconic sense of humour possessed by the series' long serving protagonists still mostly intact. It also pared back some of the mechanics presented in 3, such as stealth and action functions. It's a lot more traditional and the lack of cheap instant deaths means that's a good thing really. The puzzles as they are are quite standard fare, challenging but not as taxing as some of the classic games of the genre. The story however is full of twists and turns and there is a lot of deception involved. This leads to a finale that is in some ways as inherently ridiculous as all the great finales the series has presented us, but in more earnest and dark way. Some might not like how the absurd is played straight in this game but it's always how I've preferred my absurdity, it means one can appreciate it more. The game is certainly not perfect, there are some elements of the story that are a little underdeveloped, and the humour is definitely not as present and funny in previous entries. As such this feels like it could have simply changed the name of the characters and not been a Broken Sword game. Nevertheless, this is a very solid adventure game that offers a mostly interesting story with great characters and fun challenges. Definitely recommended.

It's in 3d, like BS3, but with a new, extremely frustrating mouse-based control system. It's imprecise and clunky. The puzzles are repetitive and extremely unintuitive. I found quite a bit of them impossible to figure out without a walk-through. Unless you are a completist or masochist, skip this one.

I've been a fan of Broken Sword from as far as I remember and this one is the only one I couldn't buy because the computer I had back then couldn't run it... I hoped that GOG would release it soon and when that happened I had to buy it. I enjoyed playing it, George Stobbart is one of my favourite video game characters, on the same league as Guybrush Threepwood and Gabriel Knight to name a few. The problem came as I was reaching the ending... I realized I didn't find the story as compelling as I did with 1 or 2, even 3 had a storyline I liked, in this one it felt rushed and when I finished I felt empty, I couldn't believe that was it but it was... Perhaps I just had high expectations on the game because I couldn't play it when it came out, but it's still a Broken Sword game and thus it's worth playing