Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut is a blast from the past and really brings back any adventure gamer who was around to see the genre's golden age in the 1990's.

Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut is a port of the first Broken Sword game to the Wii, and for the most part, the game stays the same. This includes the hand-drawn environments and characters by comic book artist Dave Gibbons. It was nice to see the game back in it's classic 2D glory, unlike the past two 3D games. Not that I have anything against the 3D games, but the cartoon-animated ones have their own unique charm to them.

Since the game is a port, all of the sound, both voicework and music, holds true to its original release. The only real differences, at least as far as I can remember, are the addition of some dialogue trees and a few extra scenes. This means the voices of George Stobbart and Nico Collard sound as good, if not better, than they did back in 1996.

Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut follows George Stobbart's first adventure. Here George ends up having to solve a murder mystery as he teams up with a fellow innocent bystander, Nico, and uncovers ancient secrets hidden by the Knights Templar. What's great is the fact that this story was written long before The Da Vinci Code craze that has embedded itself into pretty much any mystery story that involves Biblical references for the past few years.

While this game is, for the most part, the same as the previous releases, there are a few changes that make this a Director's Cut release. The most noticeable of which are some changes in dialogue (like George's opening statements) and cut scenes, but I think some of the puzzles were changed around a bit from the last time I played this game. I don't know how many of these differences are actually there and how many are just years of not playing the game that has me not fully remembering parts of it.

I have to say though, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut probably has one of the simplest (and arguably lamest) Co-op modes out there. But then again, multiplayer in a point-and-click adventure game isn't all that standard or frequently implemented. In the case of Shadow of the Templars, one player will move the character around the screen and click on objects like normal, but the second player also has a cursor on the screen. So what can that second player do? Quite frankly nothing. The other cursor can move around the screen and with a click of a button, flash some. Basically, the second player can help draw the first player's attention to something on the screen. Quite frankly, I just don't see why the effort was made to implement a Co-op mode if this is the result.

Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut brings back a lot of memories, and consequently, it brought back a lot of solutions. I didn't have a whole lot of trouble making progress through this game, even though it has been many years since I played through this particular title. Because of that, it's hard to judge the difficulty of this game. Obviously, long-time adventure gamers will find Shadow of the Templars easier than those who haven't picked up this type of game before, especially if said long-time gamer has played one of the previous releases/ports of this game.

Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut is just one of the games that show how well the Wii works with point-and-click adventure games. The mouse is replaced by your Wii-mote, but outside of that, nothing really differs. Pointing the cursor at objects of interest will cause the icon to show you how to interact with the object. Otherwise, your click will tell your character to move across the screen. You really can't get much simpler when it comes to game-interaction than point-and-click adventure games, and the Wii ports these controls over quite well.

If you've been following the adventure genre for a long time, then it should come as no surprise that this classic game would be a good purchase. For gamers that haven't had all that much experience in these puzzle-solving games, or have only played console-games in the past might want to explore the genre a bit just to be sure they like the style. But this isn't the first adventure game to come to the Wii either. Both the Sam and Max and Strong Bad games recently released by TellTale games should be a good start.