Good puzzles in childish wrapping
When I saw the Gamespot review go on and on about how great the story is, I did not get it. I guess what the reviewer meant to say is it is a great story if you are in the limited age group to appreciate it, or perhaps just mildly retarded.
I wish they would do something like they do in the traditional Disney cartoon movies instead, where they clearly are aiming at kids, but put enough twisted humor in there to entertain adults as well. Instead, I found the story to be very dry. If you find Postman Pat entertaining you might like it though, its more or less on the same level. I might give my vote to Postman Pat though.
But ok, they have a story mode, so at least you do get some more sense of reward as you solve more and more puzzles and can proceed through the story, instead of just having them tossed at you randomly.
The puzzles are indeed the heart of the game, and are quite varied. They make good use of the touch screen, and although the puzzles are quite varied and needs to be solved using the stylus pen in all kinds of different ways, the ever changing user interface never gets in the way of the puzzle solving.
The game uses a score system, which grants you different scores based on how tough the puzzle is and sometimes on how many times you had to try before you got it right. So, you do get some intensives to get it right the first time, instead of starting to guess. Most of the puzzles are constructed in a way so that guessing wont help much anyway though. The difficulty level progresses in a natural way, so you will get into the game easily, then finding yourself more and more challenged. But never to a level where its impossible, just need some patience at most.
I enjoyed the fact you are not limited by time in any of the puzzles, I always found time limitations to be a cheap way for games to raise the difficulty level, usually all it does it lowering the fun factor and adding frustration. Here it surely is the puzzle itself which stands in your way of progressing into the story.
You can also discover coins by pointing on stuff that animates in the backgrounds. Coins that can be used in cases where you really get stuck. Its a good mechanism to stop you from getting too bored from spending too much time on a puzzle (although you probably can find a walkthrough online easily)
Unlike the story, the puzzles are designed to work for all age groups. They are based on intelligence rather than experience or knowledge. So, once you get past that childish wrapping even adults can find some challenging stuff here.
All in all not bad, but I found myself getting bored quite fast, mainly because of the story related issues mentioned before...
- Blue Tomato