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Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister
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Graphics & Sound:
Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister is the series' 22nd game, and covers the teenage detective's 155th novel, "The Mystery in Tornado Alley," Like the previous releases from Her Interactive, Trail of the Twister offers up an amusing adventure with a good mix of problems to solve, and actually teaches quite a few lessens to boot.
Trail of the Twister looks and feels a lot like the past games. The locations and characters the game presents definitely get the job done, and there is enough detail in the world to give it a nice, lived-in feel. The only real problem I had with the game's visuals was the overly stiff feeling of the various characters Nancy would encounter. This was especially true for her new, temporary boss, Scott Varnell. For the most part, the characters would simply look at the camera and move their lips, and maybe occasionally their jaw, and even more rarely their arms. While the effect isn't as bad as old Johnny Quest cartoons, it was still a little unnerving to see so little movement in the lower half of the head while the characters' lips were flapping.
As for the game's audio, everything seemed to come out nice and clear and I can't say I have anything to complain about in this department. The voice acting in Trail of the Twister gets the job done, and the only real times I felt like it was overdone were while talking to Pa, the owner of the local shop. He comes off overly stereotypically country.
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Gameplay:
Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister has Nancy driving out to Tornado Alley in Oklahoma to help a local group of storm chasers figure out the mystery behind a series of accidents that hurt both equipment and people. Of course, Nancy goes in undercover and under the guise of replacing the team's assistant. As low man... errr girl on the totem pole, you will have to do many odd jobs, and each one of them is a fairly clever puzzle. Then there are quite a few that feel like simple variations on a theme and they can get a little tedious at times.
Puzzles including tasks like arranging sirens of different sizes around the map so that there is no location that isn't covered by at least one warning klaxon. Another one involves doing some filing, but, as you might expect, the file folders themselves have to be placed in a certain order based on a series of clues saying which ones go next to which others.
One of the more unusual puzzles that I've seen in any game involves going to Pa's store and buying supplies for a sample Disaster Kit. While figuring out exactly what you need is a task in and of itself, actually deciding what to buy so you stay in budget is the tricky part. For instance, you know you need flashlights, batteries, water, duct tape and so on. When you get to the store, you find out they are having various sales. Some items are marked with blue labels, some with yellow, some with green and some just have their own individual sales going on. One label might say buying two different items gets you the lesser-valued one for free, while another will say buying two like labeled items gets you a third for free and so on. This results in situations like trying to decide which flashlight to buy since one has a green label, and the other a blue, especially since the can opener only comes under the blue label. In the end, getting the right items off of the right shelves allows you to stay under budget (a dollar amount that ticks down when you put items in your cart) and move on to the next puzzle. One of the reasons this particular problem was so intriguing is that it wasn't all in front of you the whole time. You had to walk around the store quite a bit in order to get everything together, which adds the possibility of forgetting what items you bought under what sales.
Outside of the new puzzles this story presents, there is a new aspect to the game in that Nancy will have to do some driving around the town, and to aid her is her GPS. With a few mouse clicks, you set your location and destination and the route gets highlighted on your GPS for you.
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Difficulty:
Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister offers a nice mix of easy to hard puzzles. While not all are as involved and complicated as the shopping expedition described above, there are also others that are variants on Sudoku-styled puzzles, as well as a few mapped-based ones. Of all of these, I found the Sudoku-esque problems the most annoying, not because I couldn't solve them, but because they have become such an abundant puzzle in the genre that it's starting to get a little used up. Here you will see variants ranging from placing fuses in a fuse box so numbers don't touch adjacent numbers, to turning on only certain sprinkler valves in order to help water the crops. Like I said, I didn't find these hard, at least not these days since I've seen so many of this style. They are just starting to get played out.
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Game Mechanics:
One of the more unusual aspects of Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister was how much it actually teaches the player. While a lot of the game is about solving the mystery and getting through the barrage of problems to solve, along the way you are forced to learn not only about tornadoes, but how to be ready for them, where to go when one strikes, as well as how they are formed and how they behave. I found this a really interesting aspect of Trail of the Twister as I hadn't really noticed any other lessens being injected in the previous few Nancy Drew titles I've reviewed. It's almost like the developers were attempting to blur the lines between pure adventure and edutainment. While it doesn't go right out and say its trying to teach you these details, you won't get far in the game without absorbing at least some of the data thrown at you.
Like the past Her Interactive Nancy Drew titles, Trails of the Twister is geared towards a specific demographic, and while there isn't really anything that precludes male adventure gamers from taking on this title, it isn't the target audience they are going for. Quite frankly, I think it would be great to see them take on a Hardy Boys game or two for the PC, since they definitely seem to know how to handle the teen mystery book-to-game sub genre. |
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-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows XP/Vista/7, 1 GHz Pentium 3 Processor, 256 MB RAM, 1 GB Hard Disk space, 32 MB DirectX 9.0 compatible video card, 16 bit DirectX compatible sound card, 24x CD-ROM drive |
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Test System:
Windows 7 Ultimate, Intel i7 X980 3.33GHz, 12 GB RAM, Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card, DirectX 9.0c |
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