Broken Sword 4 - the Angel of Death (2006) (2014)

Lackluster through and through. After the rough transition to 3D in BS3, I had higher hopes with another 3D installment that it would be better. While the controls were far more tolerable here, most of the charm of the series is completely absent here. Playing this one with a guide is a must, the toughest puzzles are far too convoluted and require constantly referencing vague riddles. The sounds were fine, but the voice acting suffers in this version. Voice lines are pretty limited too, it's rare to get more than one line out of an interaction and towards the end of the game things become basic or reused. There's quite a few bugs getting stuck on parts of the world in later levels especially. In the final level there's a softlock regarding this which was solved with an alt-tab fyi if you make it that far. Going onto BS5 next, which if it's any good, I'd say to just read a summary or watch a playthrough of BS4 to get things in a far more condensed fashion as there's very little different you'd get out of playing.

+ 1) Switching between mouse clicking to wasd 2) Decent graphics 3) Same old characters 4) Cool puzzles including researching the manuscripts and hacking the computers - 1) Clunky. Sometimes you just get stuck and need to reload the save 2) Nico's voice acting was terrible sometimes. Also her model barely moved at first. Is she reskin of Anna Maria? 3) Terrible humor. Terrible interactions with NPC. 4) The story seems rushed in the end 5) Repetitiveness in actions to move to the next room. 6) Too much pixel hunting. You gotta squint really hard to find something on the screen. 7) Some solutions didn't make any sense Overall, this might be my least favorite game in the series. It's very frustrating, boring and some stuff aged really badly. With proper budget it might have been better, but the jokes and the dialogues are still very weak so IDK. Previous titles also had problems with rushed endings but they had its charm. Think Sleeping Dragon might be still my favorite in the series : )

Somehow even worse than the third game.

Quite possibly one of the worst games i've ever played. Don't even bother trying to play it. It's guaranteed to crash like hell, run at 10 frames per second and give you an unsatisfying ending where they ran out of money.

The 3D graphics haven't aged all that well and the game runs poorly which severely affects enjoying it, which is the main reason I won't recommend it. Another annoying thing is the almost constantly turning and moving camera, making looking at the screen exhausting and being a rather odd choice for a point&click adventure. Other than that, it's an okay game. While there aren't as many chests pushing puzzles as in the previous installment – they substituted those with an equally unoriginal hacking mini game – it is just as thin on the puzzles and you spend a lot of time talking to people and walking through empty spaces. Added in are a bunch of poorly implemented sneaking and climbing challenges and nobody knows what they were thinking back then about people wanting that from a Broken Sword game to begin with. Story is nothing to write home about, but the characters are more likable this time. You get a generic davincicode style plot with a ridiculous amount of people who aren't what they seem to be, but it's entertaining enough. Overall though, there's little reason to play this.

I haven't gotten terribly far into the game but I've already run into a game breaking bug and and several annoyances that got me stuck for a long time. There's a staircase near the beginning that allowed be to go down but I could not go back up (it was a dead end at the bottom so I had nowhere to go but back up). I had to start over from the beginning as I had not saved yet. I got stuck not long after because there was no hotspot on a ladder that I needed to climb. You had to click on just the right spot without a hotspot to indicate that you could even interact with it. I clicked on the ladder many times without success as there was no other way to go that I could see. But if you don't click on just the right spot (near the top for some reason) you can't climb it. Then there's another puzzle where I had figured out the correct action to take but doing it the first time doesn't work. There was no reason to think doing it again would give me a different outcome so I wasted a lot of time trying to do other things. The solution turned out to be doing the same action a 2nd time.