This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Teenage detective Natalie Brooks is back and a relative is in great danger! Her grandfather who is a famous archaeologist has been kidnapped and is being held to ransom by thieves looking for a lost kingdom filled with treasures. Natalie has just three days to locate a treasure map that will be vital in finding this ancient place. With the help of her friend Geoffrey join Natalie as she travels around the globe going from Big Ben to an abandoned underground subway system in an effort to stop the bad guys and rescue her grandfather.
Released less than a year after Natalie Brooks: Secrets of Treasure House (2008) developers Alawar Entertainment wasted no time bringing in its sequel Natalie Brooks: The Treasures of the Lost Kingdom (2008) to digital stores. I wonder the strategy of companies releasing a pretty poor game first before releasing its superior sequel because Treasures of the Lost Kingdom fixes some of the issues that prevented the original game being well made to the point where the sequel ends up a solid little HOPA title. The game is twice the size of the first with thirteen chapters. You get to journey across the world so the sequel tries to be epic in scale taking in places as listed in the plot synopsis along with a scene of Natalie having to break into a security filled safe. In terms of locations it never gets boring and the humour is still there thanks to the inclusion of inept Geoffrey. I question why the bad guy holding your grandfather hostage appears to look like Steven Seagal but hey who doesn’t want Seagal in their hidden object adventures right? Right? Erm…so…the sequel still mixes nice 2D comic book panels with ugly 3D art but thankfully the good outweighs the bad. Finding hidden objects is okay because of an easy to use hint system and Alawar got rid of those awful “play timed HOGs to refill hints” sequences the first game had. Puzzles aren’t too taxing although one puzzle towards the end involving making sure pieces on a game board don’t interact with each other verges on impossible. If anything what lets Treasures of the Lost Kingdom down is while it is an improvement over the original the gameplay itself is fairly mundane and nothing special. The game like Secrets of Treasure House still has a rushed ending but at least this time the developers offered on screen text as to what happens. The whole game just feels more involving and better for it.
Natalie Brooks: The Treasures of the Lost Kingdom rights some of the wrongs of the first game and on its own it’s a solid title. There are still some issues with animation and the game still lacks polish in places but generally it’s less frustrating and more coherent than its predecessor. It’s not a treasure in any way but as a diamond in the rough it succeeds more than it fails.… Expand
