The Hardy Boys: Treasure on the Tracks Review

I remember my grandmother purchase me Hardy Boys books when I was growing up. It’s a franchise that has been around seemingly forever. Actually, it dates back to 1927, believe it or not. The same stories that teenage boys find themselves enthralled with reading at night are the same target audience for the video game version of the books. For those of us that have moved onto more mature reading, you might find this game to be a bit nostalgic.

The Hardy Boys: Treasure on the Tracks is a point-and-click adventure game. It is really quite similar to Nintendo’s Professor Layton franchise. While Professor Layton was an assortment of all kinds of different puzzles, Hardy Boys focuses a lot more on dialogue and searching. Honestly, it’s more of a chore than it has to be. Some of the puzzles are confusing as to what you are supposed to do and no hints are available to help. If you get stuck at a pivotal part of the game, you won’t be moving on until you solve the puzzle.

As far as the story goes, it is solid enough. The main characters of the Hardy Boys, Joe and Frank, get invited to ride the Royal Express. Joe and Frank are searching for the missing Romanov treasure, which they supposedly hid before the Revolution took place in Russia. Their adventure starts in Paris, France and takes them across Europe to places such as Vienna, Prague and St. Petersburg.

The presentation of the game is fairly weak. There are no CG cut-scenes. Instead, everything is text and pictures. The menu system looks overly basic as well. These may seem like minor complaints, but it adds to an appearance of being a budget title. The developers used photographs of many of the locations in the game as backdrops for the game engine. Frankly, it looks rather ugly. To make matters worse, navigation is clumsy at best. Hidden arrows point the direction for you to go and until you find the right spot to click, you won’t be going anywhere.

I feel that the developers at Her Interactive had a good deal of potential with this franchise. There are countless books for them to use as source material. Unfortunately, due to either laziness or ineptitude, the interface completely ruins the experience. I can not recommend that you buy The Hardy Boys: Treasure on the Tracks. You should instead spend your money buying a good adventure game for the Nintendo DS in one of the Professor Layton titles.