Broken Sword 2.5: The Return of the Templars (PC) Review

After the main character, George Stobbart, gets a letter about his girlfriend over in Paris, Nico, stating that she's dead, he travels over there to confirm for himself if this is true or not. Once there, he sees that, luckily, this is not the case. However, Nico acts weird and is the suspect of a murder. The story kicks into high pace immediately, and offers a lot of mystery and conflicts to on-board.

The beginning of Broken Sword 2.5 is almost impossible to distinguish from a game released by Revolution itself. The hook is very strong and sucks gamers in straight away, yet it does quickly go downhill after the first half of the adventure.

What truly makes the first half shine is the sense of urgency and suspense found within, keeping excitement levels about what is going to happen next high, with great focus on details and setting the perfect mood. Towards the end, though, Broken Sword 2.5 loses this asset and turns the latter half into a bridge leading to an end - one that is as lacklustre as it comes.

The problem is that the development team wanted to shock players by revealing a lot of mysteries, in terms of how everything is connected, for instance. This is done in an unbelievable and unsolvable way, unfortunately. Characters that were thought to be on the George's side suddenly appear to, without any hint whatsoever, become their enemies… and vice versa. While this is a game about conspiracies, it leaves people in the dark too much to make the conclusion enjoyable.

Another issue is that instead of getting more and more intense, the scenes start to become more and more relaxed, which is an extremely backwards thinking plot design, and then to top the bad second half off, the ending comes too abruptly. It is as if the leader of the project told the team: "Nope! The game needs to end now. Finish that sentence you are writing and we'll call it a day, okay?" thus making the ending feel extremely unnatural.

While abrupt endings are a common thing in Revolution games, they are often handled more gracefully, with great explanations as to why, but that is barely existent here. All that players are given is an ending where normally the "point of no return" should be located in writing.

While the second half is certainly lacking, the first part and the hook in itself is good enough to carry the game through. Players will be invested enough in the story to keep on going, no matter how sluggish and poorly executed the final throes feel.