There needs to be a very compelling reason to release a director's edition of a 1996 game today. Charles Cecil - the mastermind of the Broken Sword series - believes that he still has something to add to the story told almost fifteen years ago. It was then that the first part was born - Shadow of the Templars. The decision to re-release the noble, but endlessly outdated quest rightly seemed very strange to everyone. The plot was then considered ideal, the characters were well written, and the script was interesting. Adding new elements to a finished work is always difficult, especially if it worked fine without all this before. The developers regard flirting with the classics as a legitimate attempt to introduce the younger generation to the progenitor of the series. Noble goal.
director's sword
Re-release of the first "Broken Sword" with a cumbersome title Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: The Director's Cut already noted on consoles from Nintendo: Wii and DS. On the console with the “waving stick” included, the game was especially enjoyable. And not only because solving puzzles using Nintendo controllers was, as in most similar cases, unusual and easy. The Wii version has added the possibility of a kind of co-op playthrough. One person, using a Wi-Mote, moves the character back and forth around the location, while another moves the cursor on the screen in search of active points - he is engaged in pixel hunting, in short. In the PC version, of course, there is no trace of anything like that.
Before rushing into comparative analyzes with an exhausting search for differences between the original and the re-release, we would really like to talk about the plot of the first Broken Sword as if this were our first acquaintance with it. Main character - George Stobbart. A blond student, a little shy, but not afraid to travel alone around the world. By the will of fate, he ends up in a small cafe in the glorious city of Paris, where the adventures begin.
The start is quite cheerful: explosion, corpse, clown, journalist, policeman. In some ways this all reminds me of the first Runaway watch. And a beautiful girl with a student, and adventures, and corpses, and explosions - except that they did without the clown. There was even a place in the plot for secret messages from the Templars - mention of them would later become the hallmark of the series.
The pretty lady George will meet is Nicole Collard. She works as a freelance journalist for the French newspaper La Liberte. It is an explosion in a cafe that introduces two young people. Intrigues, investigations and persecutions awaited them.
The riddles, even by the standards of Monsterwincasino.co.uk a quest from 1996, turned out to be simple in Broken Sword, solved quickly, and besides, there were catastrophically few of them. Therefore something new has been added to Director's Cut - for this, perhaps, I really want to say thank you Charles Cecil.
We don’t think it’s necessary to talk about the genre of the game. Let's just say that Broken Sword later turned from a hand-drawn cute quest into a full-fledged three-dimensional adventure series - for which, of course, it received a bunch of disapproving reviews from nostalgic old-schoolers. No, not for adventure, but for three-dimensionality. According to many (including us, admittedly, among them), with the transition to the third dimension, “Broken Sword” significantly diminished in its exceptional atmosphere; in its place came a completely different one, which did not suit everyone’s taste.
This is what Shadow of the Templars was - intriguing, exciting and at the same time incredibly light and elegant.
Unnecessary work
Revolution Software I wasn’t afraid to fit it into the original Broken Sword new plot pieces, revealing in more detail the characters and life of those heroes who received insufficient attention. At first, they let us play as the pretty Nicole Collar. Yes and not only at first. This time you will have to spend many times more time with the girl than before. We will investigate the murder and find ourselves in the most unexpected situations, solving tons of puzzles along the way. In general, you definitely won’t be bored with a journalist.
But with whom boredom cannot be avoided, it is with our old friend George Stobbart. The extended version of the quest cannot offer him anything fundamentally new. On the one hand, maybe this is correct - after all, we spent all the time in the original with him and got to know the student well. But on the other hand, a meager couple of new tasks for Stobbart look completely faded and inexpressive against the general background of the update.
Main innovation Director's Cut — displaying animated portraits of characters during dialogue. You can see a picture with a clear example somewhere very close to this paragraph. It seems like a necessary innovation - in 2010, watching a conversation between two motionless dolls is not very interesting. But portraits, in theory, should show a more complete palette of feelings and emotions of the characters.
Should have. In fact, a separate picture for the character, like the mirror of a drunk schoolboy, does not give anything other than unintelligible grimaces. Tell me, was it really hard to work on creating lip animation?? We would even agree to a mode of constantly changing two images during chatting - “open mouth / closed mouth”. They didn’t even add this - you can understand Nicole’s emotions only by the sparkle of her eyes and the opening of her mouth during amazement or fear. This also applies to others. Why they didn’t do such a basic thing is beyond comprehension.
Or the graphics - they promised to improve them too. But in fact, it turned out that only new locations seem more detailed and clear. Because of this, there is a kind of imbalance - our student wanders around the blurry and so-so-looking French streets, and the journalist in exclusive episodes wanders through quite beautiful secret rooms and apartments.
We won't give out any more slaps. With all the dubious and not always working properly innovations Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars still remains a classic quest, which definitely doesn’t lack much charm, charm and sophistication. And not all the new elements in the director's cut ended up with holes. For example, the diaries that the heroes diligently keep are an extremely useful and convenient thing. Now this is already a standard for the genre, but in 1996. Or here’s a gentle function for those lazy people who don’t even want to go on the Internet to get through. There are several clues for the puzzle, each more revealing than the other. At first they will unobtrusively hint at you, and if the epiphany does not come, then they will condescendingly poke your nose at the obvious solution.
Well, the rest is still the same Broken Sword. Yes, it has become simpler, more player-friendly, and a couple of new story episodes have been added to it. But was it necessary to do something like this with an already outstanding quest?? Personally we think not.
Getting to know the director's cut Shadow of the Templars akin to watching the sequel to “The Irony of Fate” from Timur Bekmambetov - what seemed canonical and established is suddenly hastily remade and made to believe that this is how it really is. Full-fledged remakes are perceived much better - as was already the case with Monkey Island. And in the case of Broken Sword, a special edition of the original game would be enough for us - with a bunch of additional video materials, normal operation under Windows 7 and figurines of heroes in gift sets. If anything, we gave the rating based on the merits of the original. Believe me - if it weren't for "The Director's Cut", it would have been higher.
Pros: new locations; There are more interesting mysteries; additional plot pieces.
Cons: the idea of showing close-ups of the characters’ faces was not entirely successful; the promised graphics improvement is only true for new locations.