Game: Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft
Platform: Wii
Publisher: Dreamcatcher Interactive
Developer: XPEC
ESRB: E10+
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
What's Hot: Good storyline, interesting dialog, professional voice acting
What's Not: Boring graphics, obscure objectives, too many button presses
Review by: Neilie Johnson
The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft came out last year on PC in hopes of bringing the popular Hardy adventures into the interactive arena. Sad to say, the results were uneven. Now a year later game publisher Dreamcatcher, a company apparently full of eternal optimists, has released a Wii version of the same title. A year having passed since the PC release, I hoped XPEC might have cleaned up some of the problems that plagued the PC version. No such luck. For good or ill (mostly ill) the game looks and plays exactly as the PC version did.
The Hidden Theft follows the Hardy Boys, a pair of pubescent private eyes as they investigate the theft of $200 million worth of bearer bonds from a local miser's mansion. At first blush it appears that said miser's brother is the culprit, but upon further examination, the case becomes much stickier. Along the way the boys must use all their analytical skills to look for clues, interrogate suspects and outsmart their mom. (Something Sam Spade no doubt never had to do.) Most of the game is spent exploring the fictional town of Bayport and the grounds of Spencer Mansion, with one brief foray into a bizarre Manhattan costume shop. Gameplay mostly consists of talking to people about the case and solving related situational puzzles. The talking parts are fairly interesting since the game's writing is pretty good, but the puzzle stuff—aye, there's the rub.
Adventure games always struggle with the issue of object collection. Do you prevent players from picking items up until they need them or do you let them gather stuff willy-nilly? Neither solution is ever foolproof, since the former forces players to revisit locations repeatedly in order to see what's become interactive and the latter is absurd and immersion-breaking. “Fancy that—a hubcap! That might come in handy later!”
The Hidden Theft goes with the second approach which has the boys jamming propane-filled rubber gloves, french toast recipes and sock elastic into their pockets, in hopes they'll get to use them later. This silliness points out the game's main design flaw: its obscurity. Not that your objectives are obscure, but that the methods of achieving them are so contrived. At the risk of embarrassing myself, I won't tell you how long it took me at the start of the game to figure out how to get a cell phone from one brother outside the house to another one inside it. Logic told me the one holding it could make the phone call, but no, it had to be passed to the other one or no call could be made.
This brand of illogic appears throughout the game, making it clunky and frustrating to play. And speaking of clunky, navigation in The Hidden Theft is like doing the two-step in a pair of snowshoes—way too much work. The excessive point-and-click is just as tedious as in the PC version but using the Wii remote to do it makes the problem even worse. As limited as movement is and as wooden as the boys are, it would have been nice for XPEC to automate the movement rather than making you press the A button every few feet. Sure, you can speed things up a little and double-press A to run, but that's a clumsy enterprise on the Wii remote.
Oftentimes bad adventure games with problems like these can be saved by outstanding graphics. Too bad the dev team appears to have populated the art team with a group of first-year students. The in-game art is boring but passable, with only the most basic of modeling and textures but the graphic novel intro and outro are garishly god-awful.
Adventure games are about three things: exploration, dialog and puzzle-solving. The Hidden Theft only manages to successfully hit one of these points, and doesn't even soften the blow by giving us pretty things to look at. While The Hidden Theft's script might qualify it to be a good book on tape, it makes a lousy adventure game.
Questions or comments? We'd love to
hear from you
.
