This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Explorer Alexandra Fortune is on the trail of her missing grandfather. When she was a child he gave her a magical pendant. Little did she know she could not only use it to locate her grandfather but discover an ancient hidden treasure belong to a lost civilisation. Along with her friend Jay Alexandra embarks on an expedition to find her grandfather and to solve the mystery of the Lunar Archipelago. It’s an exciting adventure which will take the player from one island to another and hopefully to a grand ‘fortune’!
I’m not quite sure what the fascination is with developers calling their game hero/heroine the theme of the game you’re playing. Alexandra Fortune? Why not call her Laura Treasure or Sarah Millions? Isn’t her surname a spoiler? With developers BlitPop Games let’s hope know what they’re doing but I don’t think they do. Alexandra Fortune: Mystery of the Lunar Archipelago (2009) wants to setup an empowered heroine who can look out for herself and also doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The problem is the game is lacking anything interesting or unique to set it apart from the thousands of heroine lead HOPA games around it. The main goal involves journeying from one island to another, searching for clues and solving puzzles, which ultimately allow you to snatch up a missing piece from each you’ll need to open “The Door” at the end of the game. The obvious jigsaw, Simon Says puzzles and memory puzzles are here but it’s all rinse and repeat without anything to make it stick out. It doesn’t help that Alexandra is insufferable. Sure, Jay is a poorly written stereotype of a useless, insecure loser but Alexandra comes across as too dismissive and arrogant to be likable. Even by 2009 the plot itself has been done ad nauseam and only gets interesting in the last quarter when the characters split up. It’s as a whole total nonsense with plot twists we never saw coming because paying attention seems pointless when the characters aren’t interesting to begin with. Alexandra Fortune tries to be as inoffensive as possible but ends up doing that at the cost of any kind of individuality. That might be fine for Alawar Entertainment but the average player today is a little more selective in what they play than choosing something so…generic.
Alexandra Fortune: Mystery of the Lunar Archipelago never amounts to much in originality or involving gameplay. It is perhaps a typical game from Alawar’s development team which unfortunately means a low budget and low ambition game. BlitPop Games would perhaps go onto produce a couple of other better games but this HOPA in a sea of superior ones remains too unremarkable and unexciting to gain anybody's attention.… Expand
