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

The Director's Cut content from the DS and Wii releases is all included, and there's voice audio throughout, even if it's still suffering from the nasty compression that plagued it before. The additional puzzles are mostly great, though, and while you can see the joins between the old and new material (particularly in the differing styles of the cut-scene animation) the whole game makes it across to the iPhone looking sharp and pretty, and boasting a nice picture-in-picture delivery that makes you think of 24 back in the days before Kiefer Sutherland transformed most of the script writers into ravaged, semi-functioning alcoholics too.

The controls are an evolution of the system used for the iPhone version of Beneath a Steel Sky - moving a finger over the screen reveals the bits and pieces you can interact with, and the inventory is a simple drag-and-drop arrangement. It's probably the best adventure game interface around on the iPhone at the moment: sufficiently slick that you won't ever really notice how clever it is. The occasional unresponsiveness from BASS is gone, however, and there are a handful of other nice refinements, such as a glowing aura around any selected objects which tells you when you're in the right position to use them.

Elsewhere, the hint system from the DS and Wii versions returns in an even kinder form, meaning you'd now have to have some really, really serious head injuries to fail to get through even the least intuitive of puzzles. (I struggled at times.) Perhaps most importantly, however, like BASS, the moment-to-moment nature of a majority of the game's set-pieces means that, although it's probably not as polished and witty as the best of the LucasArts games, the whole thing's far more suited to the short-burst nature of iPhone gaming.

Broken Sword hasn't really aged much, either. Sure, it features character death, which should have been unfashionable in adventure games even back in the mid-nineties, and it certainly has its fair share of arbitrary puzzle solutions, but it also has pleasantly adult characterisations and lots of timeless old-school heroics. You'll scramble around on window ledges, fiddle with ancient door mechanisms, and break simple codes, all of which are nice things to look forward to on a packed commute.

(It's very hard not to mention the price, too. While £3.99's not enough to make a bad game into a good one, when you're already looking at a classic, it's undeniably an added bonus. As with Chinatown Wars, it's weird to think that a title which only months ago would have cost you twenty notes is now yours for considerably less - and arguably in a more satisfying format.)