Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?

System: DS
Developer: Strass Productions
Publisher: Mindscape
Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
Players: 1

Ever since the first game was released in 1985, the Carmen Sandiego series has always been a popular series amongst gamers young and old, educating them on not history, geography and much more, but also containing a unique sense of humour as you try to catch that slippery devil with that awesome looking red hat. That being said, the series hasn’t translated well in this decade, with only an utterly awful 3D action/platformer that no-one played being the only game in the series released this decade. That being said, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego is the first entry in the series to be released onto a handheld platform, and attempts to bring back the classic adventure game style made famous by the original games. Suffice to say, it does a poor job at that.

For starters, the title gives the wrong impression. This is not a DS remake of the original game; it’s a translation of the previously French-only game “Mais où se Cache Carmen Sandiego? Mystère au Bout du Monde”, which roughly translates as “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Mystery at the End of the World”. The plot of the game is simple enough – Carmen Sandiego has stolen various treasures around the world, and it’s up to ACME agents Adam Shadow and Julia Argent to travel around the world and follow the trail of Carmen Sandiego.

The game is pretty much your stock standard point and click adventure style of gaming. You fly to a location around the world, find out what Carmen’s been doing there, solve a puzzle/complete a mini-game, and then fly to the next one, getting bits and pieces of story in between. It’s very basic stuff, and yet, it’s amazing just how badly Strass Productions has managed to ruin something that could have been very interesting and fun.


For starters, once you fly to a location, you can’t fly back out of there until you’ve finished off what you’re supposed to be doing there. Understandable, but this also applies to the game actually saving. For whatever reason, the only time the game will ever save your progress is when you complete a location. If you have to turn your DS off, then you’ll need to start back at the start of the location, and re-do all the dialogue/puzzles again. It’s a complete pain and something that could have easily been avoided by allowing you to save whenever you wanted.

The puzzles are also poorly designed, most of which with touch screen interfaces that are slow and mostly irresponsive to use. It takes more effort than it should to slide something, which should never be an issue. And then there are also a few that have clues that are very poorly written, making you wonder who the hell botched the translation job and thus making it far more difficult than it is to actually play through the game.

But what really kills it is that the game has absolutely no personality to it. Any adventure game worth its salt has plenty of this, as well as things such as memorable characters or moments, a good story and decent dialogue. Hell, the Carmen Sandiego series is known for this, making great use of puns as well as having charming characters to make up for a mostly non-existent storyline. This one doesn’t have any of that. The characters aren’t interesting, the story is forgettable, and you’re better off skipping most of the dialogue.


Visually speaking, the game does look decent. The character models are drawn somewhat competently and don’t actually look so bad, and the environments also do their job somewhat well. But that’s just it – it just looks okay. It’s just adequate. There’s nothing here that reaches out and begs to be noted, and it’s a shame too.

The sound however? Completely non-exsistant. It’s quite worrying to turn on the game and hear a thing, and then start the game and for the next 20 minutes still not hear a thing. There’s no music in the game whatsoever, leaving nothing but ambience. Sure, there is reasoning as to why there could be such a thing, and it’s honestly not that big of a loss, but to not hear a single bit of music while playing the game? That’s a bit worrying. The sound effects themselves are alright, again, nothing too fancy or memorable – just merely adequate.


Score: 4/10 - Avoid

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego could have been something great. Sure, not being based on the original game isn’t a problem, but when the game you’re bringing over isn’t up to scratch, then it becomes a major issue. The puzzles are stupid, the characters aren’t interesting, the story isn’t memorable, and the audio and visual elements are just average at best. Overall, a huge disappointment, and if you’re after a DS adventure title that might teach you a thing or two, your best bet is elsewhere.

Review by Jamie Galea (DarthHomer)