My mother wants me to go out and cut the lawn. So naturally, I'm up in my room procrastinating…. Have you seen what the weather is like these days… no way do I want to go out there in the middle of the day in this heat and mow the lawn. I have very fair skin, and I'll burn to a crisp in 5 minutes.
Anyhow, so this weekend they had a marathon of Jurassic Park on so I was kind of in the explorer dinosaur mood. I dug out my old safari hat, started talking in an English accent (I think) and went in search of a game that would be satisfactory prey for this lone explorer. Hide and Secret 4: The Lost World seemed promising so I embarked on an adventure with my old friends Will and Anna to see what trouble they had gotten themselves into this time.
It looks like that old villain Jacques was up to no good again. This time he had found the secret of immortality using ancient treasure… some golden eggs and to top it off he has kidnapped a professor and he wants to sacrifice her in order to fulfill his evil plans! Well, Will and Anna obviously are going to need my help with this one!
The game begins with your planes crash landing in this fantastic lost world where Jacques has been abusing the natives and holding the professor captive. You start right in the middle of the action down on the ground and looking for your two comrades, the sexy Lord Rockwood (giggle), and Captain Withers.
If you've played the other Hide and Secret games, you'll be able to catch on in no time. If you haven't, well you may want to check those out too as they are pretty fun to play and you'll be more familiar with the storyline and the characters. This is an adventure/puzzle hidden object game, and you're going to have to move around a lot from screen to screen and revisit a lot of areas once you unlock something elsewhere.
One thing to remember, and this is key if you don't want to do a lot of clicking around, once you get the map, you can just open it and click on a place you want to go, and you'll automatically get transported there. Unlike some hidden object games where you only have access to certain screens at a time, Hide and Secret 4 lets you visit any of the screens including the very first one! And you will have to come back to these more than once!
There are two different levels of play. Challenging and casual. I prefer casual because you get more hints and you don't have a penalty when you get a little click happy in the hidden object parts as I do sometimes when I am having trouble finding an object. But that's up to you… if you like getting frustrated, by all means, play challenging… lol.
The graphics have definitely improved in this latest rendition of the series but the gameplay is still pretty much the same and easy to pick up on. I loved the puzzles and challenges throughout the game. There was nothing too difficult that I spent hours trying to figure something out but nothing that was too easy. When you get stuck on something, you can always check the hints which will tell you exactly what you need to do next instead of some cryptic message like "there's nothing you can do here at this time." That's great… but what do I do?!
Anyhow, overall it was a fun and exciting way to spend my afternoon. Much better than mowing the lawn… although… I know I have to go do it eventually… or mom will freak out on me... maybe it will be cool enough around 10 pm or so… or September. Either one will do.
