National Geographic presents: Herod’s Lost Tomb

OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: 800 Mhz or faster Processor
RAM: 512 MB
Hard Drive: 164 MB

National Geographic presents: Herod’s Lost Tomb review

Herod’s Lost Tomb is a common hidden object game, with a few twists in form of the special tools, which you can use to help you seek some hard to find hidden objects. They usually work in a similiar way – you scan the screen with a mouse, and the tool (such as sonar scanner) indicates when you’re close or far from your target. The hints system is also good – first, you can see the shape of any object to be found just clicking it’s name in the search list – very handy when you don’t know which butterfly you have to find exactly! Also, when you request a hint – you’re shown selected object from the list, instead of just some random object. It helps when you know for sure which objects are the hardest to find.

The scenes are beautiful, but a bit overly “dusty” – everything is done in gray and dusty colors. The objects are very confusing. Since all the colors are dusty, the objects are rather small and usually hard to spot. Moreover, the object names are sometimes very confusing to say the least. There are dozens of objects suiting some descriptions, and you have to click through all of them to figure out what was meant by the developers. With no penalty for incorrect clicks that doesn’t create big problems, but still a bit annoying.

There are 20 chapters of the game, with 3 to 9 random locations visited at each chapter, but there are only a total of 16 different locations. That means that you will be playing the same sites over and over again. A lot of times you will have to search the same objects in the same scenes, and also many objects are the same across all the sites. So after awhile it becomes rather boring, although that depends on your taste.

Herod’s Lost Tomb is done to be easy, and even though it has two modes – relaxed and timed, most people should have no problems to complete the game in timed mode. There are also 2 characters to choose to play for at the start of the game, but nothing really changes if you play one or another character, so there is little replay value in this. The game features 5 mini-games – which are mostly simple jigsaw or image rotation puzzles, still it adds to the game variety a bit.

What the game lacks in the gameplay, it more than makes up in the rewards you get for it between the stages. You’ll see breathtaking graphics and video footage in the National Geographic Channel’s style.

Conclusions: Herod’s Lost Tomb is a mixed bag – this hidden objects game has a great presentation and some innovative ideas, but the lack of variety and a bit too dusty environment makes the game somewhat boring after awhile. If you like archeologic thematic, you might like the game. For the general crowd it may not appeal as much.

Online demo: Online version of Herod’s Lost Tomb is available. However, it only features 3 scenes. The graphics is also downscaled to make the game playable in a browser, which makes finding the objects almost impossible without hints. You may try it, but it doesn’t really represent what the full game has to offer – the best presentation part of the full game is absent.