Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Reviews

Having grown up with the classic "...Is Carmen San Diego" whether its USA, World, Time, History. I wanted to have something similar to have my kids play with and hopefully learn something at the same time. The old style was you find out that Carmen and her VILE crew stole something important and disappeared into the world. You had a week to find clues for a warrant and find out where they went to next. Usually by the end of the week you found out it was some criminal with a pun name like Upton Ogood e or Kit N Caboodle. Then recovered the goods and advanced up the ranks from Trainee to full time agent with the final mission before retirement being trying to get Carmen in the same week's time with some high profile prize like the Crown Jewels of England or the faces from Mount Rushmore or Telescope from Magellan. So i fired this up and instead of being shown the "Welcome to Acme Detectives please register agents", i am thrown into some cut screen which was a PITA to skip out of until I found it was the space bar. No settings ability, no menu. Just a quick "Register your player" and boom into the game. Looks like instead of stumbling around finding clues of the various henchmen we start with hunting the master criminal from the get go, there is some backstory that i didn't really get about an experienced agent who knew Carmen back when she was a member of Acme. While there is a trainee who is all the tech guru. Also now instead of trying to find clues for the henchmen, instead its trying to find clues for a warrant, its finding clues to solve silly puzzles like a anagram puzzle or a cipher puzzle. Which even for me as an adult for a couple of these made me frustrated. It also appears that this game isn't random series of "Find VILE henchmen X with object Y in place Z" and that can vary with a basic RNG setup. Instead we get, based on trying to look up some clues on how to find some of the clues for the puzzles, the same case progression no matter who is going where and how. There is some larger plot going on beyond finding Carmen. That I really wasn't invested in. Last reason for not liking this and wondering when we would get the classic back. The game is loaded down with a ton of animated cut scenes. Which on the first time you can't seem to skip and in others get repetitive if you have missed some clues and reactivate areas and head back after finding the misusing clues. There are as said before some puzzles which seem silly and very note age appropriate for a game of this type. All of that, makes me say that you shouldn't keep this and this isn't the classic Carmen Sandiego games that a Gen X'er grew up on . This is some abomination that it isn't a surprise that the game is cheap out there.