Revolution Software Limited, 2003
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is the third outing in the Broken Sword trilogy, which materializes after an interval of six long years. Those who have played the previous Broken Sword games need no introduction of our dynamic duo, George and Nico but if you are new to this adventure series then we introduce our young hero, George Stobbart, a patent lawyer who has an everlasting love for adventures and action and his partner, Nicole Collard, a French journalist working for a Paris based newspaper, who can poke her nose into any perilous place only to find a good story. Together, they have explored many bizarre locations, outwitted many dangerous people, dodged death several times and this time they are going to repeat the whole ritual in 3D in a whole new adventure.
In the beginning of this game you play as George, who's plane crashes in a Congo jungle while flying on his way to meet a scientist who wants to patent his invention, a machine that can produce endless power. But, when George reaches the place, he witnesses some criminal looking guys interrogating the scientist about a source and then they leave after killing the scientist. Now George has to investigate who those criminals were and what is the power source they were talking about?
While George is embarking on his side of adventure, somewhere in Paris a hacker decrypt a code given to him by some criminals, which reveals him some deadliest truth about the earth's destruction. The pimpled face hacker calls Nicole Collard for help and asks her to interview him about this strange and dangerous decrypted message because he is afraid that now his life is in danger. As Nicole reaches the hackers' apartment she hears a gunshot and after struggling her way inside the apartment she encounters two things, a dead hacker's body and his killer, a Russian woman, who escapes the scene leaving behind a trail to the most dangerous adventure. Now Nico has to investigate who this Russian woman is, what the dead hacker wanted to tell her and who is after the destruction of the earth? After playing some initial chapters alone our adventurous couple dramatically meet each other, as their main quest is not different but the same.
The most prominent difference in this game from its predecessors is the control interface, which is replaced from point and click to two sets of keyboard keys. The movement is controlled by the arrow keys while by default the W, A, S, and D keys control different actions, which are also indicated on the lower right corner of the screen. Some additional keys are also available for miscellaneous actions such as inventory, main menu access, etc. Puzzles' quality varies from good to very best, which in return are very logical and help building up the story. Graphically, the game has stunning pre-rendered 3D environment and the characters are well crafted with shadows effects and realistic body movements. Ambient background music and atmospheric sound effects are almost the same in quality as the graphic with damn good voice acting. As a bottom line I would salute the whole team at Revolution Software for their efforts to rejuvenate the adventure genre and providing us another chance to test our adventure gaming skills.
