A Catastrophe Of A Sequel That Should Remain Well-Hidden
I’m not sure that I’ve had a reviewing experience as confusing as Hidden Legends 2. There was an incredible amount of doubting myself, checking and double-checking that I wasn’t wrong, and booting up the first Hidden Legends to make sure that I hadn’t missed something along the way. It was an utterly befuddling experience.
Okay, here we go. Hidden Legends 2 may have that ‘2’ at the end of its title, but it is decidedly not a sequel to the original Hidden Legends, should you have played it. Rather than being considered a continuation, it should be treated as a paid demo for Hidden Legends 1. It’s the same game as the first, just pruned down, sold at a lower price, and – unforgivably – broken.
About As Far From A Legend As You Can Get
I’ll take you down the confused road that led me to the half-mark score at the end of the review. Booting up Hidden Legends 2, I was presented with a familiar menu of levels, but – worryingly – they were almost all marked as complete. I chalked it up to a bug and hopped into a level, only to find that – yes – all of the items had been designated as ‘found’ on the HUD. Again, I hoped that it was a bug, as the items were still sitting there, ready to be found in the levels. You could clearly see all the balloons, daggers and frogs that needed to be spotted.
On tapping on one of these items, a big ol’ popup congratulated me, saying ‘Level Complete!’ and prompted me to move onto the next level. At this point, I was getting a bit tired of giving Hidden Legends 2 the benefit of the doubt, but I cancelled the popup and tried to find more items. But every time I clicked on one, the popup would return, making the whole experience tiresome to say the least. There are dozens of items per level.
It’s here that I assumed that I was the problem. I’ve played Hidden Legends 1, and the save game is still sitting on my hard drive. Maybe Hidden Legends 2 got confused, and was reading my save file from the OG. So I deleted the save, deleted the first game, and – you guessed it – the problem persisted.
A Light At The End Of The Bug-Tunnel
There were, however, three levels without the issue. Snuck in on the end, they showed 0% progress, and things became hopeful again. So, I jumped into one of these levels and, indeed, they were issue free. I could play Hidden Legends 2 and actually give it a fair assessment.
That assessment immediately started to tend towards the negative. The levels were all exact copies of levels in Hidden Legends 1. Everything, from the buildings to the people, were posed exactly as they were the first time round. I remembered the polar station, the garden maze, the large mansion with wrought-iron gates. They were all areas that I’d searched through before.
To give the tiniest sliver of credit, the items were placed in different locations. I went back to Hidden Legends 1 to confirm this: there has been a rejig of the placement and number of items, even if the identity of the items are the same. While there are still screws to find in the polar station, they are hidden in different places.
There was also an actual improvement to be found. Hovering over certain buildings, the cursor would change from a hand to an eye. This meant that you could click on them to zoom into an interior, and scan those for items. It’s a welcome layer on top of the hidden object finding, and was actually something we could pop into the ‘Pros’ list at the bottom of the review. We worried we would have nothing to write there.
Death By Barrel
Even then, there is an asterisk. The rules of what can be expanded on are frustratingly inconsistent. Only some buildings can be entered, which is fine, but there are also arbitrary barrels that can be zoomed into too. There was an intensely frustrating moment where I had one more item to find, and it turned out that it was in a tiny barrel. Consider this a public service announcement: please make sure you check the tiny barrels in a level, as – yep – they can cheekily hide things from you too.
For the three playable levels, we had the tiniest dollop of fun. That fun was stolen from the first game of course: they were all levels that we had played more than once before. But it was still approaching fun.
Not that we were rewarded for it. No achievements unlocked, which was a throwback to the release of the first game. When Hidden Legends first released, the achievements didn’t unlock and several levels were unplayable. That was fixed in a later patch, but Hidden Legends 2 has reverted all of that and said “let’s go back to the glory days of bugs and unachievable achievements”. Making the same mistake twice is hard to forgive.
Save Your Pennies And Buy The Original
So, where does this leave Hidden Legends 2? Three out of ten levels are playable as current (undoubtedly a patch is incoming), and those three levels are 90% identical to ones found in Hidden Legends 1. There are no achievements for completing these levels, and a new mechanic – zooming into certain areas – is used sparingly and slightly bogusly.
Even if Hidden Legends 2 did work, we’d be turning our nose up at it. You can’t slap a number 2 on the end of your game when it is ostensibly a demo of that first game – a demo that costs £3.29, we should add. It’s disingenuous and unfair to people who liked your first game.
But to hand in homework that’s as broken and unplayable as this? That’s an instant fail. Hidden Legends 2 is an insult stacked on another insult, and we’d advise you to steer well clear. Hidden Legends 2 may get fixed in the future, but it won’t be enough to save this thin excuse for a sequel.
Important Links
Hidden Legends 2 Takes Its Hunt For Secrets Into The Fairytale World – https://www.thexboxhub.com/hidden-legends-2-takes-its-hunt-for-secrets-into-the-fairytale-world/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/hidden-legends-2/9nrk4rjdkps3
