Nancy Drew: Danger by Design
The real danger is in the game design
Tags: Nancy Drew: Danger by Design Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Sep 24th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Nancy Drew: Danger by Design (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Adventure | No | ||
 |
The Nancy Drew books are a staple of every American Elementary Library, they are the most well known introduction to the mystery genre for young girls. One would assume that the Nancy Drew adventure games from Her Interactive would have the same introductory goal. If the 14th installment, Danger by Design is any indication, they missed by a few miles. While on the surface this game has all the elements of the adventure genre, it’s entirely too tedious to actually be any fun.
 |
Based on a Nancy Drew novel, you take on the role of the eponymous detective. You find yourself in Paris investigating the enigmatic, and temperamental fashion designer Minette. She has been acting strangely, and Drew has been called in by financial backers to investigate. You arrive with the tired lost luggage fish out of water cliché as your only baggage. After meeting the fashion designers shell shocked assistant and discovering Minette has been receiving threatening phone calls and letters the adventure begins. Or at least Her Interactive’s version of adventure.
The first mini-game you must solve is making tea by a precise, and enigmatic recipe. Be prepared for many more food related mishaps. For a game revolving around a character created to be a strong female role model, it is a tad ironic that you spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
 |
While the story is well written, the game play is pure murder. As Nancy advances in her quest you will engage in ever more boring tasks. One of which is actually paint by numbers. This is the only way to make money in the game after your initial allotment, and you must buy quite a few trinkets from Parisian street vendors. You’ll find yourself, having to do this quite a few times. While not too time consuming, it gets old fast as you are given only two paintings to complete, over and over again.
 |
Being the fourteenth installment of the series, I can’t expect them to innovate. However, making a game that feels like work is quite an accomplishment in itself. Poorly laid out rooms lead to excessive roaming about to find the exact angle to pick up an item. It doesn’t take long for the new areas to feel like a curse on your existence. Especially when you need to explore a large and sprawling complex, and have no map. You travel between locales via red line through the Paris Metro. When having to go between two or three locations to finish a quest, you really wish for a skip button.
The tedium of the game does help you feel Nancy’s pain, but really when does it all end? You even have to manually dial phone numbers. When Nancy needs to contact Americans, you actually have to dial two. I have no idea why you can’t just click on a menu option. It seems to me like it was more trouble to create the phone system, than just add a few quick dialogs when you click on the phone. If they were going for immersion there were other details to attend to.
All the issues with game play aside, this would be a very excellent cartoon. The voice acting is much better than most games. The accents for the international cast are very well acted. Compared to the drama school drop-outs in most games, I was actually impressed by the effort.
 |
The game looks great, they took exceptional pains in giving each room several layers of detail. The fish in the fish tank swim, and all the people move quite naturally. If this were a cartoon, it would be of average quality. I only curse that the game was executed so poorly. The plot is the product here, and I’m sure fans of the teenage detective will slog through hours of boredom to advance to the end of this whodunit. Actually that is this game’s worst quality, it seems just thrown together to milk the cash cow of the franchise.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Voice Acting + Graphics are very well done |
5.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Tedious Mini-Games - Horrible interface with environments |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Fans of the series don't be fooled, this horrible game is meant to get another $20 from you with half a game. It looks nice, and the plot is well developed, but they seem to forget games have to be fun to play. | |
[ Post the first comment | View related posts ]
Tags: Nancy Drew: Danger by Design
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Sep 24th, 2006 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
