Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol
Score: 71% ESRB: 12+ Publisher: Microids Developer: Microids Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Puzzle (Hidden Object)/ Adventure/ Puzzle
Graphics & Sound: Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol is a Hidden Object Adventure game where you play Agent Susan Pierce tasked with locating the flame of the Statue of Liberty, which mysteriously disappeared, leaving the country in a panic. You'll explore the area around Liberty Island talking with the few remaining people on the island as you try to unravel the mystery and bring back the flame. You'll find yourself revisiting areas many times over, as the island is only so big. The graphics in the game look good, but I found that the spatial placement of arrows to guide you didn't really relate well to the signage of the different areas. In other words, you'd have a sign pointing to the Ranger's Office, but the arrow that seemed like it would direct you to the Ranger's Office actually took you elsewhere, like the warehouse or the Gift Shop. It's a small thing, but I found it disconcerting. There is no spoken dialogue, only sound effects and mysterious background music, but what's there sounds good. I did find that there were several localization errors or simply mistakes, such as the police officer, Ranger Cooper calling himself Agent Pierce. Also, sometimes I wasn't sure which item I was looking for, simply because an hourglass was called a sandglass or a flashlight was called a torch. These were more differences in language and colloquialisms than mistakes, though.
Gameplay: Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol consists of you exploring the island and completing puzzles and hidden object scenes to progress. The hidden object scenes were pretty typical in that you had a list and you needed to locate the items from the list within the scene, however I found you almost always had to zoom in on the scene and look very carefully because many objects were hidden very cleverly or were so small that this would be the only way to spot them. I liked that the developers tried very hard to tie in everything they could to the Statue of Liberty. There are always several Statue of Liberty outlines hidden within each scene or area and when you click them, you are presented with trivia tidbits about the statue. The puzzles ranged from an overhead view of your character in a maze requiring moving boxes so she could get through, to putting together a selection of objects to make a cryptic device, to having to push a group of buttons only so many times to turn a device on, to reconstructing a map or document. Some of the puzzles were novel, but most were pretty typical to what you'd expect in a Hidden Object Adventure game.`
Difficulty: Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol does not have a selectable difficulty setting. Instead, you get what you get. I didn't find the game so much hard as I found the hidden object scenes to be fairly tricky and requiring close inspection and some of the puzzles were more difficult due to a lack of explanation in how to approach them. Your directions were always incredibly basic and didn't really give you much guidance. There were also puzzles that required you to figure out the latitude and longitude based on some scribblings on a map and these took some thought. Sometimes, the Hint button wasn't really that helpful in that it told you that you needed to find an object somewhere on the island, but nothing more than that. I found myself stuck at times and I just had to step away and come back to it later. The diagrams that you are given to put together certain devices also weren't a lot of help either. It was more hit or miss and a matter of trying different objects to see what fit where.
Game Mechanics: Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol is all tapping to pick up objects or sliding objects about to complete puzzles, but they did have a unique mechanic - the use of special goggles. Since there were a lot of projectors around the island using holographic images as a means of guiding tourists, you'll often see projectors tossed about in hidden object scenes. Eventually, you will obtain some goggles that when tapped to turn on, allow you to see things you couldn't previously see. Once you have the goggles, you will then have a group of four objects, all colored blue in the list of needed items in your hidden object scenes. You can only see the items with the goggles turned on, so it's a matter of tapping the goggles on and off and letting your eyes look for changes in the scene. I did enjoy these parts of the hidden object scenes because they offered something different, but later in the game, I noticed that I could see some of the objects without using the goggles, only I couldn't pick them up. When I turned on the goggles and off again, then they'd disappear and only reappear when the goggles were on. This is a bug that was really annoying because the objects in the list don't turn blue until you have the goggles on, so I'd simply be tapping on an object I knew was in the list and I couldn't pick it up. Probably the most upsetting thing to happen was when I beat the game and the final video showed up. I read the initial dialogue and tapped to progress to the next page and it skipped the rest of the video! I then opened my game profile again, since I was brought back to the Menu screen, only to find the game had started me back at the beginning and there was no way to either start at the last checkpoint or view any of the game's unlocked videos or anything like that. Having worked my way through the entire game, only to be cheated out of seeing the ending by a simple tap that I had been using the entire game to progress through dialogue was really frustrating and quite a letdown. Overall, I find it hard to recommend Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol unless you are really looking for a game that will teach you all about the famed statue. While there were some unique puzzles and I enjoyed the fact that the story incorporated Tesla and his amazing inventions, I just didn't love the game and working all the way through it only to be cheated out of the ending really sealed the deal for me.
-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins
Related Links: Statue of Liberty: The Lost Symbol on iTunes
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