Having just completed the game I am left feeling the whole thing was one big practical joke and I wish I could get those hours of my life back.
I loved the first two in the series but this failed on every aspect.
The graphics were bad but the animations were awful.
The puzzles were mostly very linear and boring.
The story was pretty disjointed and never actually went anywhere.
The characters were all extremely dull other than being so annoying you wanted to bash them all to death with that rather handy golf club you solve every second puzzle with.

After being a huge fan of Broken Sword 1 & 2, and replaying them many times, I was let down by this game, after having high hopes for it.

The game mechanics are not well defined and feel slightly random.

The scene's are boring to look at.

The story isnt gripping or exciting.

Failure.

I wanted to love this game. I LOVED BS1 and 2. I have played them so many times over the years and they never get old. BS3 was more disappointing, all those box puzzles and sneaking around. If adventure games wanted sneaking around, wouldn't we go and buy lara croft or something?

I had hopes for BS4, especially because I naively believed the developers would listen to the fans after 3, but this is the worst. That Anna Maria I could strangle, the game is far too dark, the story is under-developed, the locations are few, didn't like the PDA was (done better in moments of silence), no one except George (naturally, there'd be uproar) has their original voice actor and the ending... dear god it was awful!! I could cry.

Now I hear tell there will be a movie. They are going to have to tread vvvvvvvveeerrry carefully with this one. I think sometimes, that the movie makers should just leave some things alone y'know?

This game has plagued me with problems. I bought it when it first came out almost a year ago. Unfortunately my laptop (2 years old at the time) and my dad's desktop PC (1.5 years old at the time) were simply unable to handle this game. It wasn't until I bought a new desktop PC that I found something that could cope with it! I would understand the high specification if the game was a popular hard-core gamer game like half-life, but generally adventure gamers have less up to date hardware. maybe I'm wrong? So first off, unless you have an extremely new system, be really careful about what spec your PC has.

I've loved adventure games since I was a child having played the classic Monkey Island games as well as the other Lucas Arts games such as Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones. Sadly there are few adventure game developers today so the Broken Sword Series really is a breath of fresh air. This latest addition is still not as good as the first two, but it is an improvement on the previous game. The controls seem to have improved and the graphics are still as beautiful as before. I must admit I still prefer a 2D interface to 3D, but they carry it off perfectly (most of the time).

The story line this time was enjoyable, but perhaps a bit more historical and religious history could have been incorporated. Still, I'd definitely buy the number 5 when it's released. Hopefully they'll make it to a more standard specification next time.

...but when it's bad, you've just turned off the computer.

I so much wanted to not merely like, but deeply love this game. The last one, the Sleeping Dragon, showed a lot of promise going into the world of 3D. But there are so many missed opportunities here that I feel ol' Charles Cecil should have rested on his laurels, as the game doesn't add anything that's new to the genre - and in order for this series and the adventure genre to survive, each Broken Sword instalment must be utterly brilliant, as the first truly was.

Is this asking too much from a first time team? Yes, I think it is. It took several games before Revolution got it down pat and then they proceeded to give LucasArts and Sierra some sleepless nights. There is virtually no high-end competition now for the point 'n' click, and there are enough missed opportunities in this game to understand why.

First, the script is vague and meandering in the second half of the story. People (especially Nico), popped up at "convenient" moments - this is really just lazy scripting. Secondly, the tools/inventory at George's disposal. The PDA could have been the best thing to have happened to the Broken Sword series. Why? Because of Gabriel Knight and SIDNEY. For those of you who are going "pardon?", there was another computer game adventure series involving a charasmatic - albeit reluctant - hero in the form of Gabriel Knight and his series was with Sierra On-Line. In the last one, "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned", SIDNEY was a neat-o computer system that had an honest-to-God encyclopedia. In the game, you could type in random subjects from Atlantis to Jesus and that got you a full-screen reference. To me, it was (and still is) the most coolest thing I've seen in an adventure game. My point here is that there are not enough references around the major puzzles involving documents in BS4, so you never feel that you are doing some proper "legwork". Yes, you're travelling around to and fro, but you're not researching something to the nth degree - see how long George spent on the one medieval document in BS1 and how long he spent in a museum. Instead, you have flashes of text (after you hack through a computer system in a neat mini-game), read some samples according to some hyperlinks, and off you go. It doesn't feel like you have complete control over George's choices in this adventure. Thirdly, the main character, George, doesn't show enough passion about the subject itself until late in the day. And fourth, the ending is abysmal.

Sorry, it's all been a bit of a downer so far, so I'll lift the spirits by saying that the writing for the dialogue is supurb (although the delivery from Nico sounds like from someone who lives in America and has been described how the French speak), the setpieces are large, there is never any "pixel-searching" for clues and getting a nun flustered about her machinery was deeply funny. Flashes of brilliance crop up, but they're not enough to give the game the polish needed to gloss over the mistakes.

It just seems a shame that in this day of high technology and Cecil's past history, we'll just have to wait for another opportunity to enjoy Broken Sword to it's full potential.