Broken Sword 2 the Smoking Mirror Remastered

When I played the first Broken Sword, I immediately realised why people praise it even to this day, with it's beautifully crafted animations, being way ahead of it's time in 1996, and clever yet very hard puzzles. I was looking forward to it's sequel simply titled as "The Smoking Mirror", but it completely lost me as it did not seem to qualify as a worthy sequel in my eyes, and not just because it has little, to no relation to the first one, but because I simply found Broken Sword 2 to be a forced sequel.

The story moves very quickly, it wastes no time on setting up anything, and drops you into the middle of the mystery from the get go, even more so, than the first game did. Nico has been kidnapped as she was looking into Mayan artifacts, causing her to meet people she shouldn't have, and it's on George entirely to save her, and together find out more about this mystery, that seems to be an even bigger worldwide threat than it was in the first game. I'm going to be honest, up until the Shaman arc, this game changed for the better, introducing new characters, old gameplay elements, but they are more fleshed out, helpful UI changes, and they also improved on the animations a lot compared to the first game, but personally these are the only qualities of Broken Sword 2 that I can praise. While I wouldn't call Broken Sword 2 a bad game, it is certainly not very fun, and uninteresting both story and puzzle wise.

I found the game to have either not fun, or very illogical, pointless puzzles. Nico's parts being the pointless ones mainly, as her "levels" barely last 2-3 minutes at max to beat, while George's not necessarily interesting, nor fun. For example in the museum, you barely get any clues besides George shrugging, and hence the game being too short, the story isn't even fleshed out. The fish puzzle is also not very good. You get the fish, you give it to the cat in hope to receive the red ball, but George couldn't get it, so instead he has to grab a rope, tie it to one of the poles, with the fish at the bottom, for the cat to move over and try to get it. Nothing leads you to this solution, not even a vague mumble from George that goes like: "Maybe If I would put the fish somewhere else". So near the end I often found myself checking the solutions instead, since the puzzles were either over complicated, or mentally tiring, where as in Broken Sword 1 (which was a lot harder, do mind you) I barely needed a guide.

To praise some puzzles too, I have to mention the final memory puzzle, that in my opinion was very good, and made me feel like Indiana Jones for a moment, and it genuinely made me happy to figure it out all by myself. (Also the easter egg about this puzzle is hilarious, I do give them that)

Overall: Broken Sword 2 while not being a bad game, is certainly doesn't get better than an Ok game, that feels rather forced, and even George's witty humour wasn't enough to carry this weak sets of story and puzzle fest on it's back, which is a shame, and hopefully the later entries bring back what Broken Sword 1 was, while even that wasn't as perfect as people seem to praise it to be.