Big City Adventures Sydney, Australia Review by Meryl

Leave your heart in San Francisco and head to Sydney, Australia in the sequel to the successful Big City Adventure: San Francisco. Instead of cable cars and Alcatraz, visit and find hidden objects in Hyde Park, the famous opera house and bridge, Circular Quay, and the Domain. Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia captures the experience of the original plus adds new features.

In this hidden object game, players seek items shown in the list of things find in a Sydney locale before time runs out. After finding all items, players receive a memento and a postcard with facts related to Australia, its past, and its present. If timed mode is too rushed for you, play relaxed mode and don’t worry about the clock.

A nice improvement lets you read any received postcard. Sometimes I didn’t feel like reading postcards and just wanted to play — so I skipped through them knowing I could go back and read them anytime.

Hidden object games often re-use the same scenes. Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia comes with 25 unique scenes. Memorizing the location of objects won’t do much good in this one — a good thing. Objects often don’t show up in the same places you’ve seen before making it harder to find them each time you counter.

The game progresses from easy to hard at a steady pace. Experienced players may not feel challenged by the clock or finding objects for half the game, but the game will grow more challenging. Don’t let the game fool you — it will get you later.

Mini-games arrive after finding all the hidden items in the world of wide-brimmed hats, kangaroos, and tribal masks. Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia contains three games from the original: Match three, jigsaw puzzle, and a memory game. The three new games include the dull Whac-a-mole rip-off called Bop-a-Croc, the so-so Pelican/Turtle Challenge for finding matching pairs of the animals’ poses, and the best one, Mahjong Titles. While you need to find matching tiles like in the other mini-games, your goal isn’t to clear the tiles — but to find the two gold stars to complete the game.

Big City Adventure: San Francisco tokens and “Quick Find Bonuses” return in this sequel. Hidden tokens appear in every scene to award players with hints, points, and adding clock time.

Like the original, this one lets you know visually when you click an invalid item. But it also misses a valid click on occasion and doesn’t like you quickly clicking multiple valid objects in a row. It needs to focus on taking one item away before the next one.

Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia leaves little room for flexibility in moving around. The game starts with traveling to a spot for finding hidden objects, playing a mini-game to find out the next destination, and repeat. It may bore some while others will appreciate not figuring out what to do next.

The music and graphics remain sharp as the original. However, the characters need improving. I thought they were corny looking in the original and they still look the same in this one with two new friends — a koala and a wallaby. With beautiful scenes, it’s surprising the characters don’t look more natural.

Players will enjoy mucking around in Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia and exploring Australia’s vibrant locales. No doubt, this will leave you guessing the next destination as you’ll most likely want to keep traveling.

We give Big City Adventure Australia a 4/5 diamond rating