It's sad to see fewer and fewer games in the adventure game mould. Once a star genre with the likes of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Full Throttle etc. etc., there's been precious few adventure puzzle type games for a little while, so I was overjoyed to see the return of the Broken Sword series of games.

The previous two games, whilst they had their flaws, were quite pleasant experiences, presented in a hand-drawn 2D style, with a point and click interface. Broken Sword 3 has ditched the old style, and gone all 3D - characters, environments, the whole shebang. It has also lightened up the puzzle aspects and thrown into the mix some rudimentary platforming elements.

As I said, it's all 3D now, and has a suitable set of graphics for such a game - the characters move around the screen nicely, with the camera following them most of the time - you aren't ever left in the situation where you can't see everything you need to. The lighting is quite moody, but, like the rest of the graphics, it's nothing outstanding. The game obviously isn't going for photo-realism, and neither is it a cartoon wonderland, but there is still a slight lack of detail on both the characters and the environment compared to what I would expect. Also, the characters' movements have regular glitches, which are especially noticeable when in conversation.

   

The sound is a different kettle of fish - it's very good all in all, with nice background music when needed, and little sonic flourishes when you're close to something important. The voice acting is suitably characterised, and very enjoyable, although I found Nico's French accent a little grating - very grating actually, although she's not helped by her script, whereas George (the main hero of the BS series for those uninitiated) is a joy to listen to, with plenty of character and funny lines. My biggest gripe with the sound is that there's no button to skip through conversation - I can see they've done this to stop you accidentally skipping important dialogue, but I still found it annoying, and I'm sure there's a better way. Luckily, I found this became less of a problem after getting 3 hours in.

The controls are quite functional - the arrow keys move your character around, and WASD keys provide the actions, that are always displayed by an icon in the bottom right of the screen. There was one occasion that when crossing some booby trapped tiles, the controls got me killed repeatedly because I couldn't walk in a straight line. But I think that was more thanks to the camera being at a funny angle.

   

The game itself is definitely an adventure puzzle game, although there is much less reliance on combining/using objects when compared to similar adventures. Instead, a large part of the puzzles in Broken Sword 3 are formed around navigating the environment - jumping, climbing, shimmying along narrow ledges, pushing blocks around to stand on to get somewhere (a lot of this last one). I guess it's all a valid puzzling exercise, but we were all doing this 7 years ago in Tomb Raider, and it was more fun then. Whilst it felt risky in Tomb Raider when you took a running leap, in BS3, it's merely a case of standing in the right place and hitting the correct button, and you'll jump automatically. I think the biggest single criticism that can be levelled at the game is that it's not really challenging enough. I know that it's very easy to go off the deep end with some really obscure puzzles ala Escape from Monkey Island, but BS3 just feels a bit too dumbed-down for my liking. I suppose that it is merely a sign of the times - the games that I've liked in the last 5 years that have had interesting puzzles have all bombed, so I guess that Revolution just decided to put a little more adventure and a little less puzzle into the mix this time.

After struggling to like this early on, I began to really enjoy myself. It's sad that the game is a little simple for the genre, and not particularly long either, but it's a worthy entry nevertheless.