Where's Waldo? The Fantastic Journey review

The big question here isn’t so much ‘where’s Waldo?’ but ‘where’s the game?’ – we rattled through this in under two hours. OK, we played on Easy difficulty, but Normal wasn’t much more of a challenge. There is no Hard mode. Those of you familiar with the Where’s Waldo? books won’t be surprised to hear that this is a ‘seek and solve’ puzzler where you have to find the stripy-jumpered hero (or other objects specified on the top screen). Spot-the-difference bits are chucked in for good measure.

We’re prepared to overlook the piffling runtime, as we can see very young gamers spending weeks on this; the bigger problem is that even though the pictures you’re scouring are vast, scrolling around tiny bits of them isn’t a substitute for having large pages in front of you. The drawings are in the same brilliantly detailed style as the books, but they’re wasted on such small screens. It’s nice to see a developer bothering to make a good quality game for junior gamers, but the books are better.

Nov 5, 2009