Broken Sword: Director's Cut (PC) review "It’s almost like Revolution have silently admitted the world is getting dumber, and wanted to baby a new generation along whilst they used to be content with challenging them."

A few years ago, I was contracted by a magazine specialising in electronic entertainment to pen a top ten list of video games you should play before you die. My list featured several surprises, but, to the shock of no one, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars ranked highly.

Several lists were configured by several different critics, but Revolution’s lauded graphic adventure featured numerously. When the lists were tallied into something the publication hoped would make a stab at validity, Broken Sword sat proudly at number seven. It deserved its acclaim; hitting PCs late 1996, it told the tale of George Stobbart: arrogant American tourist visiting Paris. Seconds after leering at his waitress and popping a passing clown’s balloon with a toothpick out of sheer spite, the café he lounges outside explodes, throwing him from his comfy perch, showering him in glass fragments and leaving him justifiably shaken and agitated.

Back then, the charming hand-painted visuals and the perfect voice acting that’s still now waiting to be surpassed culminated into a personable mystery filled with paranoia and historic conspiracy. In between the murder, the deception and George’s ham-fisted approach to amateur detective work was a clumsy blossoming romance with French photo-journalist, Nicole Collard. The two started off coolly: George’s initial sense of righteous anger in finding the madman who tried to blow him up was already starting to fade when he met Nicole taking pictures outside the razed café. Like every male trying hard to win the attention of the exotic foreign girl playing hard-to-get a little too well, he threw himself into the task of impressing the hell out of her.

When he tricks his way into the Paris sewer system, deceiving senile war veterans and outsmarting lazy construction workers, he heads straight to Nicole’s draughty flat to show off. She realises this early; the French sewer’s aren’t the most aromatic of places, and she teases him about it. He, though, flushed with pride, bulldozes through this, boasting about the evidence he had discovered, evidence the bumbling police sergeant and oddball detective failed to unearth.

The pair continue to stumble along their all-too-familiar road, still unwilling to soften to the other until they’re both doing so without realising. Nicole dismisses her professionally distant guard around George eventually, telling him about her past, her admiration for her father and the winter she spent with her Grandparents. George, in turn, recedes his smart-guy, sarcastic attitude, softening under her trust. She even goes so far as to use a male colleague to make George jealous when the quest becomes more alluring than she. It’s an ultimately human outreach, and one less angled to make her look like a controlling hussy, but more one highlighting just how important the pair become to each other in such a short time.

The new Director’s Cut had opportunity to expand on many things, but focus on Nicole especially. Rather than serve George’s impromptu date with an exploding café window as introduction, it instead begins with a journalistic endeavour through her eyes, ending in the game’s first death. In investigating this, it reveals her to have a much more personal stake in the main story than had previously been promoted. Back then, Nicole shares George’s zeal because the story she would report would catapult her into a Pulitzer prize nomination and a shot at the nationals; now, she finds family wrapped up in the conspiracy and is desperate to not only find the truth about their involvement, but ensure the world never discovers her dark little secret.

To that end, atop the original game is added three brand new chapters, each detailing Nicole’s new side of the story as she explores forgotten catacombs, majestic estates and hidden fascist headquarters left over from World War Two. In this, the updated version could have easily found a way to enhance the foundations, but for every advance it makes, something equally important is left by the wayside.

Maybe it’s unfair, then, to pick right away at the Director’s Cut‘s main addition of extra chapters, but the very first thing they highlight is a kind of crazed stupor away from what made the title so mesmerising in the first place. While Stobbart matches wits with a portly construction worker to steal away his sewer key in a largely logical progression, Nicole is flattening randomly discovered case shells and completing sliding puzzles that serve for security measures a toddler with enough patience could crack. While Stobbart is combining his inventory and manipulating the game’s colourful cast of extras to bypass hospital security, Nicole gains access to a locked-down mansion by unclipping a couple of cables and climbing up the piece of modern art that just happens to be directly under a window.

Broken Sword: Director’s Cut does a lot of the little things wrong. Back in 1996, the player was thrown out into a graphic noir world very much like our own, one brimming over with unique personalities who don’t think of themselves as cogs in a giant machine, but people getting suitably annoyed at the pushy American who won’t stop showing people the soiled tissue he found in the sewers and asking them if it means anything to them. Now updated, a lot of the dialogue options are cut in an attempt to streamline the adventure, making the Templar mysteries a significantly greater focus point, but in doing so, it robs the title of so much of its former wealth. Interactive hotspots are not only slashed in half, but are made instantly visible, taking away the nagging frustration of room-sweeping with your mouse to find them yourself, but also highlighting just how much the new version wants to hold your hand. Including an in-game hint system is understandable: a stuck player only needs visit numerous online walkthroughs should they decide coping with their frustration early is better than the cerebral rewards of working through a puzzle, but gone also are the numerous instances where George could make a fatal mistake. Leave an exclusive French hotel with an important and newly-discovered clue, and fail to remember the pair of Italian gangsters hanging around the entrance, and the last thing you’ll remember before being gifted a pair of concrete shoes and invited for a swim is an aggressive frisking and an insincere goodbye. Now, try and leave through the same door, and George will warn you that it’s not a good idea. Then tells you exactly why!

Just as big a crime is how badly the game is edited: new lines of voice acting segue into old ones with seemingly differing voices played at audibly different volumes. Old cut scenes included to help the story along as well as build characters are trounced, deleted all together or cut suddenly to a black screen rather than play out naturally. The little touches are abandoned to try and make the personalities and the quirkiness take a back seat to the detective story, but it’s a poor decision. One that made a blossoming relationship, once subtle and human, instead forceful. Personal revelations shared in private company become sudden and, although the work gone into them makes them still touching, it’s a step back.

I’ve not been invited back to compile a list of top ten games to play before you die for some years now, but, should I have to write one up tomorrow, then Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars would still rank high. Broken Sword: Directors Cut wouldn’t even make the footnotes.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (September 09, 2010) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.