Five members of the secret Unsolved Mystery Club have gone missing around the world. Each was uncovering something that would challenge ourFive members of the secret Unsolved Mystery Club have gone missing around the world. Each was uncovering something that would challenge our knowledge of advanced life on our planet. To prove aliens may have abducted your colleagues you must journey across the world, picking up from where they left off and hope they can be freed or you may be next to suffer their fate!
Upon release Unsolved Mystery Club: Amelia Earhart garnered a small amount of praise for being both a fun game and a way of educating about history. Using video clips with the ability to time travel your guide Henry Hudson taught you about Earhart’s history while you engaged in picking up clues and investigating her disappearance. It wasn’t the best HOG of all time but it had these qualities to make it stand out. Unfortunately its sequel Unsolved Mystery Club: Ancient Astronauts mostly ditches the inspirational historical clips, conspiracy investigations and education via time travel to provide a more bog standard and underwhelming adventure instead. It was probably felt amongst developers Freeze Tag that the original was short and a bit too easy. They are right but this means they’ve decided to go completely the opposite way to deliver a longer game with far too many difficult puzzles. After playing Ancient Astronauts it certainly feels bigger; about three times the size of the original but somehow just not as interesting. Going around the world to locations with ancient artefacts isn’t as fun as travelling through time learning about history. Sure, going to Giza you might learn about the history of a statue but it pales in comparison to learning about someone real. In an attempt to provide more danger to this game the plot’s attempt to make the player the only person that can save their colleagues is a good one yet your colleague’s personalities boil down to info screens. You only end up interacting with one of them (not including bits of dialogue with random people standing around) so why should the player care about rescuing them? It doesn’t take the player long also to realise aliens are the centre of what’s going on. It just then becomes a case of slogging through to the end, not helped by hugely difficult puzzles and a hint system that is simply cheap in taking forever to recharge. There is a strategy guide but it’s of course limited to the Collector’s Edition so it’s not included in the regular version, which in this particular HOG ends up defeating the point.
The biggest problem with Unsolved Mystery Club: Ancient Astronauts is that it with its nonsense undeveloped plot, boring locations and high difficulty ends up being a chore to play through. While the original wasn’t perfect it at least felt put together better than this sequel. It’s a case of where a bigger and more challenging game doesn’t mean a better one. Stick to the original.… Expand
