This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Bill and Mary are excited it’s Christmas again. They head over to watch the Grand Christmas Parade and then do shopping at the stores. A charity has been setup to help homeless people. When they can’t find what they’re looking in store they proceed to order online but they have no idea when their presents will arrive in time. Meanwhile a busy Santa Claus is preparing for his deliveries. Can he get his deliveries in time for Christmas Day while helping the homeless who need a little bit of the Christmas spirit?
Another Christmas, another festive tie-in by Virtual Playground who at this point really should know better. Christmas Wonderland 4 (2013) manages to be even less impressive than its predecessors. On the face of it the gameplay is exactly the same. You control Bill and Mary, Mike and Sally or whoever they’re called this year and you have to clear hidden object screens with pretty standard puzzles in between. I’m certain it’s the same kids since they live in the same house as in previous games. Ha, you didn’t think I’d notice! In terms of item collecting the game still suffers the same technical issues the previous ones did in that you’ll click on an object, hoping it registers since some clicks don’t. It doesn’t help that some objects are so minuscule you need a magnifying glass, let alone squinting up close at the screen to find stuff. You can collect holy ornaments in every scene but apart from getting a perfect score I see no other reason to do so. The puzzles aren’t too insane apart from a jigsaw puzzle near the end where you have to reconstruct America one state at a time. This is easy-peasy to those living in America but to everyone playing this outside of America trying to figure out the order and location of something like fifty states on a map is frustratingly hard without cheating. However what really irritates about this fourth entry is the sense of the developers phoning it in more than usual. The plot? I have no idea because there is none. Previous games in the series bothered slightly yet this game is just content with Santa flying around the world on his present run while the kids wander into stores. At one point one of the elves gets sick and nothing else happens. The children get a Bible as a present but no one bats an eyelid this is a little strange a request coming from children that have done more impossible feats like being flown with St. Nick across the clouds. Their parents don’t think it’s a little weird that after buying stuff online the kids proceed to hack into the delivery facilities webcam to check on their orders because they can’t be bothered to wait. Impatience is a virtue! What kind of message is that sending to children playing this??? A plotline involving helping homeless people goes nowhere apart from Santa at the end dropping a load of presents on the heads of people sleeping in Central Park who just want to be left alone. Virtual Playground isn’t even checking their work because the homeless figures shown look like a pile-up of dead bodies at a crime scene than people sleeping rough. Santa’s preparations for his big night at one point are also interesting as you can hear vehicles passing by in traffic when he’s supposed to be in the North Pole. Meanwhile as you search for tiny objects you’ll never find without using the built in hint system you keep hearing Santa laughing at you like your frustration is his amusement. There is no sense of progress, no sense of replay value.
Christmas Wonderland 4 has to one of the laziest sequels in gaming I’ve encountered. The most positive thing I can say about it is that the game has length. It will last a while the question obviously being can you or anyone else endure this mediocrity. The developers are happy to recycle but here do it without any conviction. Gameplay apart from puzzles involving adding colour is exactly the same. Despite the happy wrapper around it this fourth game shows no effort or enthusiasm on part of Virtual Playground. The developers at this point have given up caring or are playing a prank; one I suggest you don’t fall for. Ho, ho, ho indeed…… Expand
