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Got Game? Wilma Jandoc |
Video game shouldn’t try
to play like a movieThe eye-catcher on the press release for Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon read: "It's the video game that plays like a movie ... REALLY!"
Unfortunately, the more it gets to be like a movie, the more it stinks as a game.
Sleeping Dragon for the Xbox follows French journalist Nicole Collard and American attorney George Stobbart as they trail the evil Susarro, who wants to take advantage of a rare geological event to harness the ultimate power. You control George and Nicole at alternate times to find clues, solve puzzles, sneak around and escape death.
Advice for the game can be summed up in two-word sentences: "Move slowly" (at least when you're not trying to escape), "Check everything" and "Look carefully." Action icons change depending on what the character can interact with, and at times, you need to move slothlike to find the exact spot to make the command appear.
But the main thing you'll notice with this game -- and its big, big minus -- is its horrendously slow loading times, surprising considering the Xbox's processing power. There are many times when the game needs to load a scene.
This will get on your nerves fast if, in the course of puzzle-solving, you constantly (or accidentally) go in and out of certain doors or areas, triggering scene loads. Or if you keep dying at certain points and must play the scene over again.
The game includes action events, situations when your character is in danger. These are life-or-death scenes in which a command will suddenly pop up in the lower-right corner of the screen. You must immediately press the correct button when you see it to trigger a protective action.
So keep your hands on the controller, even when you think you're watching a simple cut scene, or you may miss your chance and will have to sit through the long loading time to replay the event.
Some puzzles are unintuitive, seemingly pulled from a "MacGyver" episode, and are better played out on the big screen. While it's easy to imagine the main guy in a movie searching his pockets and instantly hitting upon a bottle opener as the perfect tool to jam open an elevator door (there's a hint for you would-be players), the same scene is very different in a video game where players have many more options: Not only could you scroll through all the items in your inventory and painstakingly try each one, you could wander to prior rooms hoping to find the item needed.
(After all, who would ever think of using a scrawny bottle opener when there's a heavy metal pole just a few feet away?)
The saving grace of the game is the characters and the bitingly witty comments that everyone -- from a police matron to a construction worker -- makes, which lead to some funny scenes. But when they launch into movie-type dialogues to explain the back story, it's a bit hard to swallow.
And you can't skip through some conversations. If you're stuck in a puzzle and keep talking to people or re-examining items for the answer, repeated comments get boring fast.
And even the caustic humor won't be enough to hold your interest if you hit a particularly frustrating point, especially if it involves your character dying, reloading the scene, dying, loading, dying, loading, repeat ad nauseam. (Susarro's castle is a good example.)
The makers of Broken Sword seemed so caught up in making a good movie plot that they forgot this is a video game, and elements in one medium don't work in the other. If they'd kept that in mind, this would have been a much better game.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Wilma Jandoc covers the universe
of video games, anime, and manga for
the Star-Bulletin. She can be e-mailed at
wjandoc@starbulletin.com