As far as continuing the story from the first chapter, it does a pretty good job and gives us a look at this from the human perspective. Overall I enjoyed the story, but the gameplay itself seems like a backward step from the first chapter. It's incredibly buggy. I didn't find anything game-breaking, but there were quite a lot of things that were not spent time on getting right. There is missing dialogue. The voiceover doesn't quite match the subtitles a lot of the time, like a poor translation. You ever watch a foreign show or movie on Netflix and put the audio to English and the subtitles to English, but they aren't quite the same? It's like that. Sometimes a character will start speaking their line halfway through the sentence. Sometimes people will magically speak without moving their mouths. Everyone seems to have only one facial expression, no matter if they are angry, happy, sad or whatever. A lot of the time they just look in one direction, even if they are speaking to someone else. Most of the conversations are just filler... They add a little to the character's backgrounds but mostly boring AND unlike the first game, there's no option to skip dialogue. You have to sit through some pretty mind numbing conversations. It just seems like it was released before it was fully tested. As an example, in a scene a mother is supposed to be holding her baby, but the baby is invisible! Most of the gameplay revolves around fetch quests. Go get someone a cup of tea. Go get something to fix the squeaky crib. Go get the 3 cables a character needs. When you aren't fetching items, you are moving from cover to cover to avoid being seen. Scattered in between fetching and hiding, you have a few logic (or trial and error) puzzles to contend with. Nothing taxing on the brain. This isn't anything on the level of the Tex Murphy puzzles. But, for all it's faults... I did enjoy the story and look forward to there hopefully being another game to see what happens next.
I was around 10 when this was first released and I remember playing it for hours, day in and day out. This was back when game boxes were the size of small houses and before walkthroughs were readily available to anyone with an internet connection. I remember the only way to get hints was to use my dad's external modem to dial up to Sierra's Bulletin Board System and find the answer to questions like "I've done everything on day 1, why won't the day end?" Good times. I must have replayed the game a hundred times, between its release and the point somewhere along the line where my latest PC was unable to run it, just trying to either get the perfect score or making different choices to see what happened. The story keeps true to the Robin Hood lore, with all the characters you'd expect to see, plus a few more. The interface is the classic Sierra VGA point-and-click style that we all look back on with fondness. If you've never played this game before, don't let the above screenshots fool you. Whoever decided to use these screenshots has made the game seem somewhat... perverted and depraved, which it is far from. Sure there is a lot of humour that only adults will understand, thrown in for comic relief, but the story doesn't revolve around that humour as the screenshots suggest. All in all, one of Sierra's best adventures from their golden age, that I would highly recommend,
The Gabriel Knight series is one of my favourites in the gaming world, so when I heard about this remake I pre-ordered. It's been very well done, but as a fan of the original I have to say it's lost some of its charm. Going from a 2D layout to a 3D one means some things had to be cut. For example, Gabriel can no longer climb the ladder in the book store, but Grace still tells him to "get down". Another one is that Gabriel no longer hugs his Gran when he goes to see her. These are small things but I feel it was a shame to omit them. The story is the same, with a few minor changes in puzzle item locations, and the inclusion of a few new puzzles and screens to keep it fresh for returning players like myself. The screens have been faithfully recreated and updated for our modern platforms with HD and the music has been amazingly remastered. The voice actors do an awesome job, although a part of me misses Tim Curry as Gabriel. Overall, I really enjoyed re-playing the original story in its updated form, although I can't help but feel the time put into making this would have been better spent on giving us a Gabriel Knight 4...
Let's face it... while Broken Sword 3 and 4 had good stories, there was just something missing from the gameplay and overall feel about them that the first twos games brought. Broken Sword 5 recaptures that feeling from the first two games - the look, the music, the sense of mystery and adventure - it's all there. The hint system works well for giving you a nudge in the right direction without giving away the whole solution, the story is well scripted and the characters are voiced well. I'm looking forward to Episode 2 being released.
This is one of the best point 'n' click adventure games that has been released in a long time. Most modern adventure games try to put too much effort into the graphics and sadly lack where it really counts, in the gameplay, story and dialogue. Thankfully Gemini Rue is the complete opposite. With old school graphics, a simple and easy to use interface and amazing story this is simply a joy to play. Reminiscent of games like "Innocent Until Caught" and it's sequel "Guilty" it has that cyberpunk feel to it - set it a futuristic universe but with a dose of detective noir thrown in for good measure. Not to be missed!