Royal Detective: The Last Charm Collector's Edition Reviews

Very good one! Recommended!

The third game in the Royal Detective Series on Steam. Very enjoyable, I preferred it to the second game in the series, and liked it almost as much as the first game. The one oddity is that there is no Royal Detective in the main story - only in the bonus story. That said, both the main and bonus story are quite good, and the bonus story is a substantial addition to the both the game and the story as a whole. In this chapter you play as the Princess as she tries to rescue her daughter from an evil (?) witch. But as the adventure progresses, the Princess learns of her own undeniable part in the current disaster. This is an unusual HOPA game, in that the "bad guy" may have a reasonable, even sympathetic, motivation for their (not so great) actions. Pros: - artwork, music, and overall gameplay are high quality - several different kinds of HO scenes & nicely done - story is reasonably interesting for the genre - customizable difficulty and fully interactive map (including collectibles) - puzzles are varied and a few are moderately challenging - overall, the right amount of back and forth within a set of related screens - very good bonus chapter (other "bonuses" are nice, but standard; the little puzzles to assemble are pretty; in-game achievements are fun to try for) Cons: - arguably, we didn't need [b]three[/b] sets of collectibles; that said, they were reasonable to find once you got used to locating the puzzle pieces within zoom-in screens; still not sure if this is really a con - maybe a few too many "find X to unlock Y... use Y to unlock Z... okay now go back to the first scene and unlock A" - honestly, *why* can't you just *ask* the local carpenter to give you a match? - more could have been done with secondary characters - the series is a bit weak in terms of not keeping useful items Summary: It's a very good game for the genre, worth buying with any reasonable discount (Big Fish games are expensive on Steam, especially given the lack of trading cards or Steam achievements)