What’s Broken Sword you say? Only one of the best point-and-click adventure game series ever made (I never made it past the second game in the series, but the first two were awesome). Broken Sword tells the story of a young American George Stobbart who as a tourist in Paris becomes involved in a conspiracy involving the Templars, a french photo journalist named Nicole Collard and a clown. That’s all I’m going to reveal about the story of the first game, because if you haven’t played it yet, you should (It’s on ScummVM, so it will run on a modern PC) and I don’t want to spoil it for you.

The appeal of the first two games, besides their great story, was their incredible production value. The games featured beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds as well as cel-animated characters and cut-scenes (made possible by Philippine labor). Also, the first Broken Sword game released in 1996 was the first game I recall playing that featured an orchestral soundtrack (composed by the Australian-born Barrington Pheloung).

After the release of “The Smoking Mirror”, the second game in the series, Revolution Software departed from the point-and-click formula and made the switch to 3D. That was in 2003 when 2D was already dead as a doornail. While the third and fourth installment of the series might have been worthy successors, I kinda felt betrayed when I realized it no longer had the cel-animations that I admired the first two parts of the series for. So I never played them and I probably never will.

So why am I talking about Broken Sword now? A few years ago I found a website talking about a fan-made successor to “The Smoking Mirror” that showed a good amount of promise. What I didn’t realize however was how far away that game was from being released. For some reason however, I kept visiting their website and I closely followed the progress. Then, just a few weeks ago the unthinkable happened: the game – Broken Sword 2.5 – was released! I downloaded it three days ago, and completed it just now.

My verdict: It’s pretty darn impressive. To pull off a project of that scope is simply amazing and the quality of the final product is beyond what anybody could have hoped for. This is mostly thanks to the incredible voice actors which give the whole production a level of professionalism that is not commonly found in a fan-made game. Similarly, the soundtrack is very well done and compares favorably to the soundtracks found in commercial games. Now the artwork, that’s a different story. While there are some backgrounds that are extremely well done, the overall art style is very inconsistent. Some backgrounds are rendered, some are clearly made from heavily edited and filtered photos and others have a more or less hand-drawn look. The majority of the backgrounds are however really well-done, but some are also quite bad (and I’m only saying that because they stand out in an otherwise very polished product). In a similar fashion, the characters in the game lack consistency. For the most part, they’re really well-done (kudos to my fellow student Isolde Scheurer who I’m told drew most of them), but some of them are also “sub-par”. The game also features a number of 3D animated cut-scenes which are reasonably well-done, but sort of put me off with their rendered look. I don’t know if the makers of the game tried cel-shading at any point, but I think I might have preferred that (that’s just my two cents though). What did I forget? Oh, right, the story! It’s good but not great. It has some interesting twists but at some point drifts into absurdity. There are also a few plot holes and the quality of the dialogue varies greatly. But then again, a good voice actor (and the game has plenty of those) can read pretty much anything and make it sound good. What else? Oh, the riddles! The game is pretty easy and most riddles involve objects that you’ll find in the immediate proximity of one another. This has the obvious benefit that the game never becomes frustrating, but it also significantly reduces play time.

None of those minor flaws however can take away from my admiration for this project. So if you have nothing better to do (and since you’re reading this, I assume you don’t), download Broken Sword 2.5 now and be prepared to spend the next six hours or so of your life playing it. Be warned though that you can’t just “check out the game real quick”. I tried that and ended up playing it for the next two days.