Broken Sword - The Smoking Mirror: Remastered
Positives:
+ Awesome, beautiful, classic and detailed graphics/artwork. The backgrounds have been cleaned up nicely and don't look as pixelated; nor is there any screen tearing present like in the original with ScummVM. There's also the odd new little special effect or animation in the cutscenes
+ Barrington Pheloung's music score is just as great, beautifully composed, and haunting as in Broken Sword 1
+ The voice acting is solid and well performed; especially Rolf Saxon as George
+ Puzzles are generally logical
+ The interface has been tweaked and cleaned up just like in the first Director's Cut, which includes a satchel for the inventory, a spanner for the options, a question mark for hints, and a notebook to keep you up-to-date with what's been happening
+ Character portrait's mouths now animate when they're talking
+ You can unlock a few goodies in the main menu, such as the comic...
Negatives:
- The story is inferior and not as well written as in
The Shadow of the Templars. After my recent playthrough of BS2, I've come to the realization that the story in
The Sleeping Dragon is MUCH better written!
- A number of familiar characters aren't voiced by the same actors as in the first game; they also sound poor in comparison
- The humor isn't as funny or witty as in
The Shadow of the Templars
- Personally, I find the character portraits to be ugly and I wish there was an option to turn them off
- There's still dialogue and hotspots missing, and this time, the odd cutscene has been edited - little snippets of scenes have been cut and shortened down - and the lighting effect from George's torch when he's with Titipoco is missing
- I've noticed graphical/sprite glitches, which weren't in the original, whereby character sprites would disappear (when they should), but then reappeared again as the scene faded to black
- The new sound effects during the final cutscene just sound noisy and bad
- The credits song - 'Happiness is an Inside Job' - reloops twice instead of just playing the once, which is weird
- Again, in comparison to
The Shadow of the Templars, the game is just too short and feels more linear
Overall:
or...
6.5 out of 10
Again, I'll just stick to the original
