Broken Sword: Director’s Cut – Review

Our rating:

By: Revolution Software Limited

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2010-01-24

Developer:

Price: 6.99

User Rating:

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If you were me growing up, you played Space Quest, King’s Quest, Monkey Island, and countless other graphic adventure games. If you were me playing Broken Sword on the iPhone, you probably lost more than one night’s sleep reliving those experiences, totally enthralled by the beautiful artwork and the impressive voice-acting. That’s right, a fully voice acted adventure game on the iPhone.

The whole game takes about 12-20 hours to play through, and you travel all over Europe and the middle-east in that time, trying to unravel a mystery centered around the legendary Knights Templar. The plot is surprisingly deep, and the characters doubly so. Even some of the inconsequential side characters are dripping with backstory that never gets mentioned. Your two main characters, French native Nico Collard and American tourist George Stobbart are convincingly dynamic characters that do seem to grow over the course of the game. I don’t care what Ebert says; this is one video game that is definitely art.

The puzzles are, of course, the meat of the game, and they deliver well enough. If you like old-school adventure games’ puzzles, you’ll like the ones here. Oh, and just as a heads up, a rudimentary knowledge of Latin will help you immensely in a few of the puzzles.

Broken Sword is built with many fine parts, and the end result is a beautiful throwback to the good old days of adventure gaming, combined with fantastic innovations of modern technology. The touch interface is highly intuitive, allowing you to look at, or interact with, almost everything on the screen, and using items from your inventory is just as easy.