A "slight" improvement over it's predecessor, but still a complete waste of potential by City Interactive.
The Hunt for the Puppeteer is a "slight" improvement over FBI Confidential, but is still a complete waste of potential by graphically talented studio. There's a lot of common between the games. The protagonist, FBI agent Nicole, gets called in to help solve a serial killer case. She then gets asked to stop investigating but decides to continue on her own. Along the way she meets uninteresting, boring characters that make her do dumb things to progress in the game. One prominent example would be "Sir your life is in danger, we need to leave the city now..." at which point the response is "Ok, but we need to take care of my nephew's motorcycle first. I promised him I'd take care of it". There are a lot of moments in the game where you say to yourself, I had to do THAT to get THAT?
The game also has incredibly artistic environments to explore, as an American who probably won't get to see Cuba in the condition it has lived in for more than 50 years, I liked seeing the studio's take on the environment there. But it's a shame there's not an interesting story to enhance the atmosphere. The killer is exacting a revenge based on an episode of the French Revolution that occurred 200 years prior, but it's such a shallow plot the climax is incredibly unsatisfying. I'm glad the player can now see closeups of the inventory items, one small improvement over the previous game, which I rated a 5. Hunt for Puppeteer is a solid 5.5. Since I love the genre so much I'm giving the third in the series (Cards of Destiny) a try, maybe it will be a 6? Will it be too much to hope for fun characters and a well written story?