Step into the shoes of Carmen Sandiego from the past, a master thief of modern times.
Old-school gamers like you will probably have played some kind of Carmen Sandiego back in the 90s. Maybe yours was Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego?, and you might feel some nostalgic vibes playing this new version of the game.
This time, you are Carmen Sandiego—you are not trying to find her in most of the game. Developed and published by Gameloft, you actually go through a detective story mode. It’s unclear whether it is tied to the Netflix show, but it definitely has some similarities storywise. Nevertheless, this is a review of Carmen Sandiego in modern times.
What you’re doing in this game is finding bad guys based on clues—real-world clues, suspect clues—and tracking them down, which is very similar to what you would think this game would be like. The game does offer a campaign mode, so you are following a story. There are multiple episodes out, with more to come. And there’s also a mode that lets you endlessly play different scenarios.
The gist of the Carmen Sandiego goes like this: If you are unfamiliar, you are given some kind of report about a bad guy or some kind of thief activity going on, and it is your job to track that person down. This is all-encompassed in a time frame.
For example, you may have seven or five days to find the thief, accurately place a warrant on them, and arrest them within that time frame. The way that you move down in time is by traveling to different locations and gathering clues.
Carmen Sandiego is mostly presented in 2D. In the base sense of the game, in the mode where you can endlessly play, you may come across a section that has a little logic puzzle or requires you to answer questions. But for the most part, you are just getting hints from the locals in that particular location.
Almost every location in Carmen Sandiego, if not every location, will give you a city lead that will help you get to the next city correctly. The reason you want to get to the next city correctly out of three possible choices is that if you go to the wrong city, you will travel back and have to choose again.
It will tell you that it costs you time, so that’s where a little bit of time management comes into play. It’s not time management in the sense that you have to act fast—you just have to act correctly.
The other thing that they can drop, which is a little more seldom in experience, are suspect clues. This is kind of the other half of the Carmen Sandiego. Both city leads and suspect clues help you narrow down an answer to a question—either where or who.
The city leads may have you look at the airport codes or take apart a key part of the sentence, such as figuring out that this country uses dollars as currency or specializes in this export.
The suspect clues are similar, but regarding people. You might get a clue that the suspect is right-handed—that one’s pretty obvious. There are others that say something like, “This one was really afraid of the dentist.” In Carmen Sandiego, you’ll be given a suspect tracker, which is pretty cool. You have a set of suspects, and using filters, you can narrow down who your suspect is.
One of those sections is fears, and one of the fears you can filter on is the fear of teeth. So, if a suspect or a thief is afraid of the dentist, it likely means they are afraid of teeth, so you can filter out suspects from the list that way.
Sometimes, in Carmen Sandiego, the suspect clues you get are just rumors, and it will tell you that. So you may not want to use them. If you want to confirm those rumors, you can, as long as you pay some time. It may cost you four hours of your time to answer that suspect’s clue.
You are going to go through this loop over and over again because that’s the game. Where it differs a little bit is in the campaign mode, the story mode. It actually has some production value, and in some of the levels, you are playing as Carmen Sandiego.
You get to walk around that little section—it’s not very big usually—and do something, some kind of puzzle or logic game, and then gather clues that help you fill out your encyclopedia of all these places.
One thing that you might enjoy about Carmen Sandiego is that it takes you out of the game, and maybe it feels like cheating because you hadn’t learned it yet in the game—or you missed it. There may be some clues that have you Googling things and learning about these countries.
There could be a particular item—maybe some kind of woven basket—that you don’t know what it is. You might never have heard that name before, so you Google it and find that it’s mostly done in a certain country. And what do you know? That country is on your list to pick from when traveling. That ends up helping you make that decision.
You might like that—it feels more interactive that way. But if you don’t want to do that, most of the clues, if not all, can be found in the game. Some of them are a little more obscure, and you find them in the flavor text, the “lore” that you pick up. It’s not really lore—it’s facts, to be honest, that you get from playing the Carmen Sandiego more. You just might not have found them yet, so Googling them could be your option at that point.
To wrap up the scenarios, once you get to the final destination, you are given some kind of indicator that this is it—the thief is close. You have to pick one of the right locations. But the other stipulation is that you have to have placed a warrant on a suspect.
That’s why you need to balance your time with the gambling—so to speak—of gathering enough clues to make your warrant and arrest. If you happen to give a warrant to the wrong person and arrest the wrong person, you lose. You’ve got to do it again.
You do get experience points in Carmen Sandiego, but they don’t really do anything. They just kind of block you from continuing with the later levels in the campaign and the “more difficult” levels in what could be called endless mode. So, there is some artificial lengthening of your gameplay with that. Otherwise, it doesn’t really do anything extra other than making you play a few extra cases here and there.
Overall, there are several story missions out at the moment, but some in the game say “coming soon,” so take that for what it’s worth. You do have an endless mode in Carmen Sandiego, so there’s always replayability.
It’s not super difficult, so this would be great for kids—maybe pre-teenage or younger if they can comprehend the clues and whatnot. You could play with your kids and solve the cases together, which would be pretty fun.
But yeah, that is Carmen Sandiego. It definitely gives off some old-school vibes to the games you might have played on the computer back in the day. You may enjoy this one—it’s not hard, to say the least, but enjoyable for the short time that it takes to get through it.
You might not think it overstays its welcome. If and when new episodes get added, you’ll pick those up just to play them and see what they’re about and to get back into the game in small chunks.
