Congo Climbing - nothing else quite like it.

Each is persuing their own business when our tale starts, having gone their own ways after the affair of the Smoking Mirror, with George travelling to the Congo to help verify a patent claim a client is making and Nico going to meet a very nervous computer hacker in Paris who thinks the end of the world is nigh. Eventually their journeys will coincide and pooling resources together both George and Nico work towards saving the world. No prizes for guessing that eventually they will succeed but the trail that leads to that has many a twist. You will have to travel to the Congo, Prague, Glastonbury, Egypt and Paris all the while dogged by people who really don't want you interferring in their plans.

Shopping in Glastonbury.

Perhaps nicest of all neither George nor Nico favour gunplay as a puzzle solving method instead relying on their wits and brains to find a less violent solution. It makes the game suitable fare for pretty much any age, although the younger players will appreciate having an adult handy to help with the puzzles. The banter the pair exchange, both between each other and with anyone else that happens to be handy, is both informative and usually quite funny. It isn't uncommon to almost miss something important because you are laughing. Fortunately a fairly detailed notebook is kept so salient points are never lost. This sense of humour prevents the game from getting too dark as some very nasty events unfold, instead keeping the story cracking along making it very much a page turner. Indeed on our playthrough it was so enthralling that one session ended up finishing at 3am from a 7pm start.

A moody castle in Prague marks the
start of some of the really big plot revelations.

Gameplay breaks down to a third person cinematic viewpoint observing the world as we guide the particular character we are controlling through the 3D world. Periodicly we swap between Nico and George as the story demands as well as controlling George while Nico offers her particular brand of observation on proceedings. The previous two games in the Broken Sword series have been classic point and click adventures - here Revolution Studios have decided to revamp matters and go fully 3D. Care has been taken with the graphic design to not distance itself much from the stylised graphics of the earlier titles and the end result is realistic but not photorealistic. Within the gameworld you maneuver relative to the camera position, so down always advances towards the camera, up goes away etc... This does cause a little confusion from time to time when the camera angles change a little more abruptly than usual. Such is fairly rare however as the norm is a more gradual camera shift that maintains close to the same orientation on the world as the previous camera angle.

Early deliberations in Paris,
the game is afoot!

Objects you can examine or interact with show up as a highlighted point of interest - multiple objects are each highlighted if they are in range and you can select which particular object to interact with by toggling through them. Each object then highlights a set of contextually sensitive actions on the action buttons (of which there are four). People can be talked to, doors opened or listened to to see if someone is behind them, answerphones can be used to call people or listen to the stored messages and generally you can quite clearly see what you can do with an object. The system is further extended by allowing items in the inventory to be combined as well and then used on an item in the real world

Deserts always makes the best locales for
quick conversations, don't you agree?

If you are thinking this all sounds ideal for use with a gamepad then you would be right, the system is clearly tailored for console gamers however it works pretty well on the PC as well. Especially if you have a gamepad connected yourself. This game automatically identified and used the gamepad we had connected to the review machine but you can use keyboard control. This works pretty well but isn't much more than a straight mapping of button presses to keypresses.

Fiddling with ancient machinery.

This is perhaps the weakest part of the game as a whole as the experience with a gamepad is much better than keyboard control alone. To be fair the game does not require fast reflexes to solve puzzles so while slightly painful the keyboard control never prevents you from advancing. It is just easier to use a gamepad and we do recommend playing with one if you can. The other two foibles we found with the game was that three puzzles stuck us as being a bit obtuse. One requires you to find an area to search that is not wildly obvious that you could even get in there and the other two require stacking objects to access them when it also is not terribly obvious that that is what you would want to do. Slightly better cueing would have helped but it really is a minor quibble when three out of a hundred or more puzzles is less than obvious. More serious is that two puzzles can be placed into such a state that they can not be solved and progress in the game becomes impossible. Once you realise this it is trivial to rectify matters from a save game but this can be mildly aggrivating due to the lack of an autosave in the game.

Crystal power.

The game will let you retry action segments where your character can die, think of them as mildly interactive cinematic moments more than anything else, but it doesn't explicitly save at all. Consequently a game crash or provoking one of the two unsolvable states can be somewhat irritating requiring the replaying of several hours worth of gameplay. It is a testament to the quality of the game that this did little other than mildly annoy us but we suggest that players routinely do a save each level transition to avoid such frustration. Fortunately crashes were rare with our testing suffering exactly one crash to desktop.

Your ever helpful notebook.

Otherwise you get to enjoy a stylish view and some excellent voice acting filling out the characters you meet throughout the story. There is a certain Melissa we would definitely like to meet based on the voice alone. Indeed throughout the game care has been taken to match the voice well to the character with only one Beatrice being on the annoying side, something that is in character unfortunately. Underpinning it is a lush orchestral score and sound effects work to die for. Certain rat noises were so convincing there was a brief moment when we were searching the room looking for them before realising it was a part of the games ambient sound work. Scoring brings a further cinematic flourish to proceedings with dramatic cues rising as appropriate and each locale having it's own musical theme to set the mood. The audio work is simply exquisite.

Anubis makes an appearance, try not to antagonise him.