Treasures of Mystery Island Review: Uninspired Gameplay and Story

Alawar Entertainment's Treasures of Mystery Island is a hidden-object puzzle game that promises great excitement. Heck, even the description in the Play Store gives you the impression that you're going to take part in some sort of epic adventure. Unfortunately, the game doesn't deliver on the excitement factor: The story is bland, and I found gameplay far too easy.

First, the story: While most hidden-object games at least try for an interesting storyline, Treasures of Mystery Island does not. The idea is that you are stuck on an island with some really unorganized natives, and in order to unravel the mysteries that surround the island, you (as a character named Alex) must help them organize their stuff. Needless to say, this is not quite as exciting or "mysterious" as the title would suggest.

Flimsy plot aside, Treasures of Mystery Island is your basic point-and-touch hidden object game with a gameplay twist that makes the game kind of frustrating. Instead of looking for specific hidden objects, you're looking for parts of specific objects (usually three or four). The problem is that you see the objects as a whole, and you have no idea how they're broken up. This makes it more difficult to find things, since you're only vaguely aware of what you should be looking for.

On the plus side, since the parts of objects that you're looking for are weird shapes, you can get pretty far by just searching for things that look slightly off in the big picture. It's an interesting idea; it just isn't presented very well.

Treasures of Mystery Island comes in a full version for $1 and a simpler free version.

A few of the puzzles in the full version don't have you searching for various parts, and they're fairly easy to complete--once you figure out what you're supposed to do. These puzzles lack instructions, and it can be tricky to determine how to handle a specific challenge

All in all, Treasures of Mystery Island is a letdown. The art is just okay, the storyline is awful, and the puzzles are nothing more than annoying. If you absolutely adore hidden-object games, you may still enjoy this one, but otherwise I recommend you move on.

This app was tested using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0.2.