Review: Great Adventures - Where's That S?
by Robb Romero
September 30, 2010
Overview
Great Adventures is a casual adventuring game with elements of puzzle games, time management, and hidden objects. Working through the narrative will provide players with more areas to explore and things to do, swiftly drawing them in for a great adventure in little time at all.
Features
After picking male and female avatars, players can interact with their characters in several ways. Tapping a blank space of the map will send the character to that place. Tapping an object will send the character to pick up the object. Your characters can also be dragged and dropped (and onto objects) across the map to save time. There are many objects to interact with in this game, and the environments are often very animated and generally fun to explore. More areas of the hotel and map will be revealed after completing your clearly stated objectives. While many of the objectives are easy to understand, they often require some problem solving or exploratory thinking in order to be completed, which provides a great incentive to continue playing and thinking about the game.
If you get stuck and can not figure out what to do, you can use five bones you've collected to ask your dog Sam for a hint. Bones are one of the most common items available in the game, and they provide a very fair balance as to how often you may want a hint.
As you manage your two characters' actions through the narrative, you'll also need to monitor their three needs: Rest, Food, and Fun. Paying close attention to their needs and keeping their respective status bars filled will allow your characters to move and act more quickly to complete your objectives. Each set of objectives is scored, and top scores can be submitted to Crystal for replay value or comparison with other adventurers.
The Good
There are lots of achievements to be grabbed as you explore the lush environment and try to solve the mystery. With such intuitive controls and autosaving, you'll find it easy to continue exploring right away whenever you start again. The time-management mechanics complement the scoring system in a way that provides for a replay value not found in most hidden object apps. Playing as two characters also creates a great casual dynamic for the game, as the characters can be shared between two people, or players can really multitask and try for those top spots on the leaderboards. Though older players may be dismissive of the game's narrative, those who enjoy narrative or adventure are sure to be delighted with the sheer variety the game provides.The Bad
Because this game does have such a great variety of things to do, it relies on a narrative structure of events that players will eventually find limiting. A common complaint of hidden-object and puzzle games is that there aren't enough levels, or they were too short. By their nature, most of these games typically are short, and Great Adventures is not much of an exception.
Leaderboards are available via Crystal, but in order to play an objective again, you'll need to start an entire new player account. Once you beat the game and solve the mystery, loading your saved file only provides you with the ending instead of any gameplay. The only way to try to improve your scores is by playing through the narrative yet another time.
It may disappoint some players that replaying for a high score can not offer a different narrative. The characters are even reliant on the narrative in such a way that even if you choose different avatars the second time around, they will still be "Scientist, Nimble" and "Mechanic, Strong."
