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Weaving a tale of murder, mystery, mayhem, and
medieval history, Revolution Software has ported its popular PC title
Circle of Blood to the PlayStation. The terrific storyline has been kept
intact, with all its shadowy nuances of the occult and unexpected
humor, but the game just isn't as fun to play as it was on the PC.
You're George Stobbart, hapless American tourist in
Paris drawn into a far-reaching world-domination plot by a bomb
exploding in the quiet cafe where you're drinking coffee. You're called
to be an unlikely and somewhat awkward hero as you cross the globe -
from Spain to Syria to France to Ireland - in search of the truth and
the reason behind a seemingly unconnected series of murders. The
storyline is solid, laden with historical myth and mystery (the Knights
Templar, central to the game, were known to exist in early medieval
times, but no one knows what happened to them, if they still exist,
where their treasure went, and so on). The story also introduces a
handful of well-developed characters, including your accomplice, the
sophisticated Parisian Nicole Collard, as well as the psychic police
inspector Rosso and pub-lurking exaggerator Liam MacGuire.
Puzzles fit well into the fabric of the game. Most are
relevant and usually are solvable with a reasonable portion of wit and a
slow mouse (stumpers can often be solved if you crawl the cursor over
the screen very, very slowly and find that small object). Only one or
two felt illogical or random, which in an adventure game with more than
25 puzzles or so, seems a reasonable ratio.
The problem, however, is that the load times are
terrible. Because this is an adventure game, it is necessary to move
frequently between screens, and to have to wait and wait while the next
screen loads is annoying. One puzzle requires that you use a wet object,
but the place where you use the wet object is six screens away from
where you wet it, so woe betide you if your object dries out before you
can make use of it (it's guaranteed, by the way, to happen at least
once). You have to backtrack six screens, waiting for each to load, wet
the object, and trundle back through the same six screens to use it.
Broken Sword takes far longer to play through than it should because it
takes so long to put a solution into place. Likewise, load times destroy
some cutscenes, particularly ones that cut from George's startled face
to the action, to George, to the action. What was originally designed as
a suspenseful back and forth is completely undermined by the slowness
of moving from one image to the next.
Finally, Circle of Blood was acclaimed for its superb
graphics. Broken Sword retains the exotic locales and the crispness of
background scenes - many of the team members worked on comic book cult
hit Tank Girl - but it's more difficult now to see character faces
clearly or in any kind of detail (and I played on a big TV). The
graphics feel condensed and smushed when compared with the PC version,
which also might explain why it can be so challenging to place the
cursor in exactly the right place.
Broken Sword is compatible with the PlayStation mouse
and has an excellent original score and involving storyline peopled with
curious and unusual characters. If only it wasn't so hard to physically
get through it.
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pass: mediafiregames.net
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