Game Review - Mystery Legends: Beauty and the Beast

Game Review - Mystery Legends: Beauty and the Beast (Collector's Edition)
Score +5/-1

Overview

Like the other Mystery Legends games (The Phantom of the Opera Collector's Edition, Sleepy Hollow), Mystery Legends: Beauty and the Beast picks up where the fairy tale leaves off and lets you play through a spin-off tale. As with the previous games in the series, the artwork in Beauty and the Beast is beautiful. Some animations result in poorly anti-aliased images, however, but for a casual game they cannot really rely on their target audience to have strong computers, and some scenes are already sluggish with the use of certain animations/FX (e.g., smoke, which is notoriously hard on graphics processing).

Definitely get the Collector's Edition for the bonus chapter. Everything else in the Collector's Edition is of little consequence, especially the strategy guide (walkthrough), which you can find online anyway.

+ Beautiful fantasy artwork.
+ Good use of cutscenes.
+ There is a good range of puzzles to the minigames. Also the minigames try to be strongly related to the story in the type of action you are performing, a bit more so than most story-driven hidden object games.
-+ The hidden object minigames typically use a jumble of implausibly placed items. The hidden objects in the game locations, however, are fairly well hidden without being overtly out of place.
+ The story is interesting with a range of environments and actions to perform.
+There is a very nice arcade game finale. It's not a "real" arcade game in that you can't lose, per se -- you just need to figure out what to do, just like any other minigame. But it adds an active and exciting element to what is otherwise a fairly typical game for its genre.