'Hardy Boys' not exactly puzzling

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Nov 2, 2009

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Though the Hardy Boys have been around for more than 80 years, their gaming history is brief and, so far, unimpressive. Now the development studio responsible for the popular videogame incarnation of Nancy Drew, Her Interactive, is looking to change that with their latest game, “The Hardy Boys: Treasure on the Tracks.” The end result takes a few steps in the right direction, but ultimately lacks the polish necessary for a good adventure game.

Having – I’m assuming – solved every outstanding mystery in the U.S., the perpetually teenaged super-sleuths are called to Europe to solve a mystery involving a lost fortune, the last tsar of Russia and a train carrying a wide assortment of puzzle-filled artwork.

The game gets off to a bit of a rough start. There’s a very low gameplay-to-dialogue ratio, and the controls are almost entirely stylus-based and somewhat unintuitive. Things improve, though. While much of the dialogue is overly long exposition, it tapers off once you get going, and some of the writing is clever enough to be entertaining.

The control system also improves, after a quick visit to the tutorial section explains that you need to rub the stylus all over the screen to reveal the actions you can take in each area. It feels somewhat odd to be treating the Louvre like a giant masterpiece-laden lottery scratch card, but the system isn’t bad once you get used to it.

Once the puzzles actually start, the outlook seems even rosier. The early brainteasers are fairly simple, but they show some promise. The later, more complex puzzles never show up. Many of the later puzzles are rehashes of early events, and the few interesting ones that do require logic or attention to detail tend to be susceptible to trial and error.

The cut-and-paste feel of the puzzles makes me suspect that the game was somewhat rushed, and there are a few other pieces of somewhat annoying evidence to this effect. Certain things take longer than they should, like scene transitions and bringing up your cell phone/menu. There’s no autosave, a problem made much worse for me by the two times the game crashed while I was playing.

Still, the story has its moments, there are some genuinely fun puzzles, and the game is never really frustrating – crashing excepted. And while games like “Professor Layton and the Curious Village” may beat the Hardy Boys on challenging puzzles, there aren’t really a whole lot of quality, narrative-focused adventure games for the DS yet. At only $20, it may be worth a purchase if you’re willing to forgive some rough edges, or you know a younger gamer who likes puzzles and doesn’t mind learning a bit of Russian history.