I must confess that The Sleeping Dragon was my first Broken Sword game, but regardless I was immediately drawn into the story, the intricate conspiracies and last, but not least, the lovable characters. As lawyer-turned-adventurer George Stobbart and journalist Nico Collard, you must stop a grand plot that could endanger the entire world. Of course, you only slowly realize the grand scheme of things, but overall the progression of the story is good enough, although with the game often leaving one of the protagonists at a cliffhanger to return to the other sometimes makes it hard to keep track of what happens when. Regardless, you almost always just need to fix "the next" puzzle in order to see what happens now. And, yeah, the puzzles... Well, as a puzzle game this almost boils down to "Sokoban 3D". You push a hilarious amount of boxes (and stones) around in this game. Trouble in a plane? Push boxes! Need to trespass into an enemy base? Pile boxes! In the end, this tends to break the immersion of the game, and you could have wished for Revolution to have downplayed the box puzzles a little bit... As for other puzzles, they range from logic to damn-near-illogical. While most puzzles are probably on par with most point-and-click adventure games, some of them are utterly strange. Like melting facepaint in a nigh-invisible stage lamp or using a silver coin as a screwdriver. Furthermore, the "take everything" concept makes it even harder to figure out what item you need to use when, and often caused me to simply try all of my items on a certain object (which was very annoying since you cannot skip the 'I cannot use that here'-comments) BUT The one huge selling point that The Sleeping Dragon has is its characters. The 3D rendering of George and Nico is surprisingly well-done - especially Nico, who sports some of the most advanced facial expressions I've seen in games in a long time. When I first played this game, I really grew to love the characters, as they are filled to the brink with personality and charm, and the way they work together, commenting and joking with each other is simply spectacular. That kept me going, because I needed to know what would happen to them. In comparison, most of the secondary characters are stereotypes with VERY stereotypical voices, ranging from acceptable to downright annoying (God, I can't stand that goth chick!) All in all, if you love adventure games, you'd probably feel right at home here. Just be ready for at least a few fairly difficult puzzles - and lots and lots of boxes!
