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The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft Review
User Submitted The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft Reviews
Date: 2009-01-03
An okay game, if you can get past the problems
Good things:
- An interesting mystery with lots of twists.
- Fun puzzles.
- Different locations to visit and a variety of characters to interact with.
Bad things:
- The graphics are VERY dated. We're talking at least five years old - and even then, they wouldn't have been good. Think the early Nancy Drew games.
- The game engine is bad. Solving the puzzles was often easier than figuring out how to exit a room. Seeing poor Joe Hardy shuffling clumsily after his brother for the whole game was painful.
- Everything that you can click on is something you need. You can click on nothing else. This gives the game a closed off feeling. It makes knowing where to go and what to do easier, though.
- The whole thing with the Hardy Boys being agents for ATAC is just stupid. I'm not familiar with the Hardy Boys the way I am with Nancy Drew, but apparently they work with an agency called ATAC which is some kind of junior FBI for high school students. It's idiotic. Yeah, whenever I lose $200 million in bearer bonds, I immediately think, "Quick! Bring in the 11th graders!"
- The comic book scenes bookending the mystery are poorly done and extremely cheap-looking.
- This game is short - about the same as the Nancy Drew games.
Overall: I really did have fun playing this mystery, in spite of all the problems mentioned. It had some very fun puzzles, and wasn't so difficult that I had to play with a walkthrough in my hand the whole time. An interesting storyline, also. However, it's surprising that The Adventure Company put so little effort into a game that could be the start of a successful franchise. I wouldn't be surprised if the downside was enough to scare plenty of consumers away from this title in the future.
Date: 2008-12-29
slow and loose controls
Even though my computer exceeds the minimum requirements, the animations in this game are slow and glitchy like it needs more memory. Now, I can play the most state-of-the-art online games with no trouble, but I can't even get the boys out of the house because it takes too long just to move the mouse up to the menu to change characters much less get down the stairs, wait several seconds for Frank to grab the keys, wait several seconds for Frank to talk about the keys, and get back upstairs before he gets caught.
The mouse wanders quite a lot, so selecting something is about like steering a boat. I can't imagine what playing the rest of this would be like. I'm trading it in.
Date: 2008-12-29
Unbelievably Awful
Having played all the Nancy Drew games together, my daughter and I were really looking forward to this game and loaded it onto her computer immediately after Christmas. It would not run on her 3 year old computer and consistantly caused the whole computer to freeze. It did run on my brand new computer, and I almost wish it hadn't. This game is AWFUL. The user interface stinks, it is really difficult to even move the characters where you want them to go, and the graphics look like a game from years ago. This is NOT a companion to the HerInteractive Nancy Drew games. Save your money for their next release, it will be well worth it I am sure.
Date: 2008-12-27
Don't Bother With This Game!!!
We purchased this game after playing nearly all of the Nancy Drew (Her Interactive) series. This game is NOT the same computer series. First, it takes more than double disk space than even the biggest Nancy Drew game or even the Harry Potter series (EA Games). We have never been able to play it. It continuously crashes my 4GB hard drive with 1GB Ram each time we tried to access the program. I reinstalled three times to no avail. We also purchased the newest Nancy Drew game at the same time and we've been playing it without any problems. The company which makes Hardy Boys games (The Adventure Company) doesn't seem to know what they are doing.
Date: 2008-12-26
poor quality
REVIEW: Very disappointing...The ending was entirely corny. There were too many sketched comic book scenes that made this game seem less of an actual adventure game and more like a cartoon. Parts of it were fun (looking for stuff) and the graphics were fairly nice. The dialogues were sometimes mundane. Being a big fan of the Nancy Drew game series (I have all of them), The Hardy Boys game was much like ND's Game #1, not quite "there" and let's hope the next game comes out with some quality, if there IS another one in the works.
TECHNICAL: I had no problems with running the game, and did not need the video patch. Am running XP SP2. The voices had problems though, fading in places, as if they cut out the original dialogue and did a voice-over at the wrong sound level. I found myself having to adjust the volume quite a bit, both up and down.
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