Review of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut

This is an updated port of the PC game from 1994 with some additional material added for this release. It says something about the state of this genre of games on the Wii that a fifteen year old game is currently the best of the lot. There's is still much to like here. The story is good, even if it feels dated. The animation is pretty, it feels like you're playing a cartoon on television. The puzzles are mostly interesting, even if some of them feel like they've been shoehorned in for no reason at all.

There's also much to dislike here. The game really shows it's age. The creators of the game quite obviously did not keep around any high quality source material for the game elements. You can easily detect compression artefacts for the sound and the videos, which really betrays the age of the game. The control scheme is frustrating to use at several points in the game, especially if you have to use the Wii remote to rotate anything. The hint system is a great addition, if only it worked better. It would give me hints about things I'd already done and forced me to go through all the hints to get to ones I actually found useful.

The bottom line is that for fans of this genre, this is as good as it gets on the Wii right now. So rent it, take a weekend to finish it and return it. This isn't a game that has any replay value once you're done with the story.

7/10