Calum Petrie reviews Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy…
The latest adventure in the ever growing “Layton” series has us tackling the wonderfully portrayed streets of London in Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy. Once you get over the mouthful of a title then you are in for a treat of puzzles, animation and gameplay that will be familiar to fans and welcoming to newcomers.
The title is developed by long time Layton development team at Level 5, who has been working on this series since 2007’s Professor Layton and the Curious Village. The series found a massive following for its intricate art styling and vast array of puzzles for players to solve, and this game is very much directed to those who like a challenge and love brain teasers.
The latest instalment once again moves away from the Nintendo 3DS and puts the game onto the most accessible and widely used markets of today – the smartphone. I was playing the game on Android, which was downloaded via the Google Play store, though the game is available on IOS for the Apple users of the world (I heard there are a few of you).
As the title suggests, we step away from the long time series Gentlemen protagonist Hershel Layton and are now in the shoes of Katrielle, who is Hershel’s daughter. The young woman has just opened her own detective agency in a very swanky part of London, where she is already putting the local police to shame.
The game has Katrielle and company undertake a number of cases where you will not just become familiar with the new layout and characters of the game, but you will also discover that the DS was not the only format where this game worked.
The navigation of the game’s UI is not that different from the DS counterparts, where the screen is split into two sections, with most of the menu information being on the bottom half and the main game narrative happening above. Players will have to navigate from screen to screen by selecting points on a mini-map on the lower half of the screen to explore new areas for those sweet, sweet puzzles.
The game puzzles live up to the expectations that any fan of the series has come to love and expect, while newcomers should not be put off as the game still has hints available for those who may need them. Though when you choose to practice a puzzle before you decide on an answer, using your finger to draw instead of a stylus takes a lot of the neat and tidy lines away from drawings and can make you yearn for the DS versions.
Hint coins and hidden objects are once again found by scouring the beautiful drawn backgrounds of all the screens within the game allowing you to find the hidden objects in plain sight.
The music has always been an extremely charming part of the Layton series and a standout point where fans of the game can even reminisce over which soundtrack was the most memorable. The trend continues with this mobile release; players have the full fleshed out Layton experience while not having to dig out the DS and games.
When starting the game, I found myself getting very bored of waiting for all the game’s explanations and tutorials to finish as some of the features are very self-explanatory. I do understand developers wanting to make everything as simple to understand as possible within their games though.
The whole package of this latest game is an extremely satisfying experience and seems like the stigma of “mobile gaming” is moving less away from the Clash of Clans and Bejewelled games, instead leaning more towards well known IPs and tried and tested formulas on mobile gaming devices. Although the title of the game is a tad on the long winded side, we find the new character a good figurehead for the new direction the release of these games may be taking. Katrielle is far from being the worst character – in fact her personality could have just been a carbon copy of Hershel, and instead she is a bright and vibrant woman who can often play aloof and nonchalant as she would like people to think that about her. This is shown many times in the early stages of the game where she uses these traits to let people underestimate her and gain an upper hand.
The biggest fault I can find with this game so far is the price point; the £15.99 price tag may seem like a steal on a Nintendo hand held console, but that price for the mobile market is like buying a collector’s edition of a console title. It is a price point that I can see a lot of people shying away from for a digital title and nothing physical to go alongside it. This is a shame because I believe the craft and effort that went into making the game is fantastic though it is hard to see why this costs three times the price of many games on the same market.
A positive I can see from this may be that since Nintendo is now moving into the mobile market as well, we may see the original games getting ported over to mobile devices, allowing for a great series to have another hurrah on this platform.
Pros
- Great art styling
- Great soundtrack
- The variations of puzzles
Cons
- Price point
- Very long drawn out conversations at the beginning on the game
Rating – 7/10
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