Broken Sword 4 - the Angel of Death (2006)

I wouldn't say this is a bad game, just a product of bad choices. Starting 3, the 3D felt like a shock, somewhere around 80% I was used to it and even started to like it. I did not like the art choices for 4. The game does feel rushed, but it was a different time, 3D Universes like GTA were hits, 2D practically had 1 foot out the door and there were big developments in the industry overall because of the HD Console generation. Complaints about the jokes and the writing style of this game are invalid. I played this game 20 years ago and as a 13-year old a lot of jokes definitely went over my head. But having played the previous 3 last month, the writing is in line with the series, but there are a couple of lore errors (again, rushed). For the bad reviews complaining about the story, almost every question is explained in the game so don't let that stop you. As a mild fan of the series, skipping wasn't an option anyway, but if you played the last 3, you will still notice this game breathes Broken Sword, but it's just hard on the eyes. But definitely don't start with this one or introduce someone to the series with this one.

This game is so hard that I thought it just did not work at first. Everything has to be done by a spoiler. I am on the bomb now, and can not get past it. Hard game if you can do it.

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 : )

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.

I didn't like the 3th game in series and somehow that game is now good when i played this on. No autosave, i lost hours of progress and simply quit didn't want to start from the beginning. Controls are awful, no support for controller. No way to skip dialog and npcs are repeating same sentences every time. Absolutely worst game in series, still haven't played 5th entry but this is absolute disaster.