This time around the story has taken the course of involving the ancient Mayans and a cult surrounding them. While you don't find the link to the Mayans until later in the game, they serve a strong importance to the plot. It all begins with George returning to France to meet up with his girlfriend, Nico. Nico wants to have an artifact of hers checked out by an archaeologist that was recommended to her, so they head over there before doing any other activities. Things go wrong quickly. Both of them are knocked unconscious by poison darts shot into their necks. Nico is kidnapped and taken to an unknown location, while George is tied to a chair in a room that has been lit on fire and a highly deadly spider is closely nearing him. This is where the game picks up, and the adventure begins.

Since this is a point and click type of game, it features 2D drawn sprite backgrounds and characters, not like the pre-rendered backdrops and polygonal characters found in the Square's role playing games Final Fantasy VII and VIII. While this may not be as realistic as the two mentioned games, it allows for the designers to do a bit more, since 2D is not quite as limited technologically wise. The various backgrounds are detailed and interesting, but a bit stale and boring. Occasionally there will be a person or two who walks by while in a city, but I wished there was more moving and going on while I am going about my business.

You do not control the character directly in Broken Sword II, instead you have a mouse pointer that you use to interact with the characters on screen and the environment. Problem number one that occurs is the speed of the cursor. Most people don't have the PlayStation mouse available to them (although the game does support it if you have it), and are then forced to use the normal game controller. At first I began using the digital pad and found that to be annoyingly slow. Throwing up the speed in the options menu helped, but it was still there as an nuisance. If you have an analog controller things are helped since it moves along much faster, but either way there are problems. Problem number two is that neither the analog nor digital are very precise. I found it hard to maneuver the cursor around the screen at times and centering on a certain object was a pain every so often. This becomes most problematic when there are sequences when you need to click on something at a certain moment and are unable to lock onto a specific position.

It isn't uncommon to see games like this having trouble keeping the load times down. The PlayStation has certain restraints that prevent it from getting the job done the best way, so this is compensated through painfully frequent loading. Each time you switch to a new area there is around a three second pause for loading, and when you are moving back and forth between a couple areas to complete a specific event, by the fourth time you want to throw a rock at your PlayStation. Then there are some useless events that take a few seconds to load that are utterly useless. Take, for example, in the very first level where a picture is above a mantel. Clicking on it will bring the loading screen up and then a zoomed view of the picture with George giving a short comment will come up. Gee, how useful was that!

Finding items that are in the environments is a crucial part to Broken Sword II, and, unfortunately, there are some problems with this. Some of the items are so small and blended into the backgrounds that they become indistinguishable. Whenever I was stuck looking for an object, usually just scanning up and down the room would accidentally pop up what I needed. Adding to the frustration as the previous problem of centering the cursor on a given item.

Music plays a key part in pulling the gamer in to the experience, and there are a few parts that do not work so well in this department. The music that is used while simply waltzing around and during cut scenes is done well and helps set the mood, but when you are in a conversation with one of the game's characters it falls apart at the seams. Picking a particular item will chime in a piece of music that is usually loud enough to help drown out some of the dialog (which is all spoken out) and sounds incredibly out of place and inappropriate. Having music in conversations is something I do not have a problem with, but it should be used at sparingly and at the right times.