This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Sprill is back for more adventures and this time he’s brought along his inventor pal Ritchie! Sprill is going to need all the help he can get when the future mysteriously changes thanks to a magic pearl. It seems someone has been making changes to the timeline. Join Sprill as he journeys through various time zones finding objects that shouldn’t belong and putting the timeline back in order because if he doesn’t Earth’s future is doomed!
Alawar Five-BN’s Sprill: The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle (2008) proved to be financially successful enough to warrant a sequel. Unsurprisingly this meant bringing back fox character Sprill for its sequel Sprill & Ritchie: Adventures in Time (2009). This time out hero fox is joined by his crazy inventor pal Ritchie who serves as general interaction and help with time travel between various points in time. Together the two act like a budget version of Ratchet & Clank. The sequel gets rid of the comic book presentation of the original, instead going for fairly budget 3D graphics. It’s certainly an improvement somewhat over the previous game in the series. There’s more variety than in Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. The locations you travel to cover nearly every important time period so the developers intended for this to be a HOG with scope. This includes a bizarre subplot in which you need to visit a present day doctor to cure Ritchie who seems to have transformed into Hulk-Ritchie. It’s a big game and I know the developers wanted something that couldn’t be completed in an hour. It’s also unfortunate some of the same issues remain from the first HOG game. Adventures in Time is just as unfair with its item placement as in Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle and that can also be applied to the uneven difficulty of the puzzles. There’s a regenerating hint system this time so thankfully no more pixel hunting for hint opportunities. The music by composer George Yurkin is at least nice to listen to with its easy listening electronic vibes. The game upon release received a post mortem article by the developers. This article goes in a bit of detail about the evolution of Sprill as a character and the conveyor belt approach to making games within the HOG and HOPA genre. Adventures in Time ends on a cliffhanger so a sequel was expected but for some reason Alawar Five-BN sort of lost interest. I’m not sure where they could have gone with the series after this.
Sprill & Ritchie: Adventures in Time is not a total improvement over the previous game due to having some of the same flaws as its predecessor. However it’s a lot more playable and I think with the kinks ironed out it could have been a better game. The game’s length also counteracts the steep difficulty somewhat so at least you feel you’re getting your monies worth. Unlike the original the game remains inoffensive fun for the family although I wonder where the developers could have taken the series after going so epic here.… Expand
