There’s also a mini-game for diffusing bombs, in which the player must interrupt electrical currents using the four face buttons (or by tapping the stylus), as well as one for picking locks. Honestly, I wasn’t very impressed with any of these mini-games, but at the same time none of them are terrible either. Although Color Match and Happy Tiles can be slightly challenging (the former when nabbing the faster moving symbols, and the latter while trying to convert the entire board), I don’t think any of these mini-games will give younger gamers much trouble.
So the mini-games are good enough to be serviceable, but unfortunately the adventuring aspect itself is underwhelming. Although the environments themselves aren’t that large, they can still take several excruciating seconds to cross because Nancy walks incredibly slowly. Even during several sequences late in the game, in which time is of the essence, Nancy still saunters nonchalantly across the screen, and would no doubt be twirling her hair if the DS had the horsepower to display that level of detail on her smallish 3D model. Environments are very under populated as well, with no more than one NPC onscreen with Nancy at any given time.
There are also several stealth sequences in the game, where Nancy must elude security guards and other characters by sticking to the shadows. Walking in the light at least part of the time is unavoidable during these sequences, which are shown from an overhead perspective, so the trick is to minimize doing that to avoid filling up the stealth meter. In a way these areas actually benefit from Nancy’s slow gait, as it adds an element of tension and strategic planning, so the pacing isn’t all bad.
Despite the problems with Nancy’s speed, and some ho-hum mini-games, the real problem with Nancy Drew: The Deadly Secret of Olde World Park is that it simply feels unfinished. It took me roughly 3 hours to completely finish the game, and that’s with the pace of the story (as far as getting answers is concerned) really accelerating towards the end of the game. As I mentioned before it’s pretty linear, so I don’t see it taking much longer for younger gamers either. Also, during adventure mode the bottom screen holds Nancy’s clue journal and inventory, but I never filled up even half of the 12 or so available slots each seems to hold. Perhaps younger gamers wouldn’t resolve clues and uses for inventory items quite as quickly as I did, and thus there may be a need for those extra slots, but I honestly don’t see how they couldn’t given the linearity of the game (the player can’t freely travel between locations to accumulate unfinished clues). Plus, each character has 9 available icon slots for dialog topics to discuss, but I never saw a character with more than 4 or so available. All of these factors make the game feel really incomplete, as if developer Gorilla Systems had grand plans that were seriously curtailed to shorten development time, but even if this is really what the developers planned all along, the fact remains that this is a very short single-player only game with virtually no replay value.
Bottom Line:
The only real draw here is that the mystery is actually pretty good, with a satisfying ending that should leave younger fans pleased. However, you can get the same thing out of a $4.99 paperback book, and the actual game itself just doesn’t do enough to make this a the top-tier DS adventure title.
So while Nancy Drew: The Deadly Secret of Olde World Park may be a decent pick-up for younger fans of Ms. Drew, most adventure fans will probably want to leave this mystery unsolved.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
|
| 5.5 |
Posted: 2007-10-20 13:56:05 PST