Review: Hannah Montana
Story
Hannah Montana is a mystery game with three mysteries to be solved.
In the first mystery your father wakes you to distressing news. You have just received an anonymous letter from a disgruntled fan that claims to know Hannah Montana’s true identity is none other than Miley Stewart! Oh noes! Now you must now track the clues down to find your disgruntled fan and convince him not to blab. I’ll spare you the middle (mostly because I already forgot it) and jump straight to the end. Miley finds the fan but he refuses to keep his mouth shut so you will have to pull a fast one on him. You invite him to meet Hannah Montana backstage at tonight’s concert with you (as Miley) thus proving Miley and Hannah are not the same person! One well place wig on your best friend Lilly and disaster averted. Hooray, let’s get the concert started!
./end dream sequence
The next morning arrives and you are pretty darn tired from putting on such an awesome show last night (…in your dreams?). And that’s when the unthinkable happens; you receive an email from an anonymous fan claiming to know Hannah Montana’s true identity. Now is the time you should go back to the previous paragraph and re-read it because this story line plays out exactly the same.
In the third mystery you receive a text message… ./sigh.
The final chapter ends with you being sent back to your home looking for a clue but instead you find a surprise party. WHAT?!? Apparently you have failed to realize today is your birthday and your father set-up all these mysteries to get you out of the house long enough to put up some party decorations. Awesome.
Gameplay
The bulk of the game is basically a book. Approach someone that might help you solve the mystery, find out they can’t help you but remember some small detail that sends you to some else that might be able to help you instead. There is a lot game space you can visit; your home, the mall, the school, the beach, and the stadium. However, as the previous person in your investigation tells you exactly where to go next, it doesn’t really matter.
Occasionally when you approach someone they refuse to answer you question until you find some object for them. This is the time you break out your magnifying glass (if the lights are on) or flashlight (if they are off) and scan your stylus over the screen until you find the objects. I say objects because every signal time the object is broken into two and you have to use your menu to combine them.
Oliver (a friend), Jackson (brother) and some random (bitchy) girls sometimes distract you from getting where you want to go. When they do you must go through a branching dialogue system where all but one branch cause you to fail. Luckily the correct branch is generally easy to identify.
Not always but sometime when traveling from location to location you will play a skate boarding mini game. It’s pretty simple, use the stylus to move trash, cats, and balls off the road so you don’t run into them.
Oh, and as you progress you unlock fabrics and designs for your clothes editor. As stupid as this sounds, when you go to your closet you can design your own clothes to wear but you can’t actually wear them. They just sit in your closet or if you are really adventurous you can trade you design with a friend over the wireless and it will sit in their closet instead.
Presentation
Visually, I have no complaints. The music was fine but I have to question why they didn’t use any Hannah Montana music. The real thorn, none of the recognizable characters (Miley, Lilly, Jackson, ect.) were recognizable. Lilly is not a punk skater grrl. Miley is not a coasty bitch. I swear the developers must have gotten a one paragraph summary of Hannah Montana and nothing else because each of the characters were adolescent stereotypes not at all reminiscent of the characters they were suppose to represent.
Final Thoughts
On the one hand I want to say this game was a lot like touch detective except that unlike touch detective you never had to think. All the clues were directly told to you and then you were told exactly where to go next.
On the other hand I want to say this game is a lot like hotel dusk: 215 because similarly these games are pretty much books. The big difference being that the story was horrible. Even when I scale expectations back due to the young audience this game was developed for the product was still disappointing.
So basically I played a story-driven adventure game with a bad story that repeated three times and characters that were both horribly written and unrepresentative of the actual characters. I hate to admit it but I really don’t have a choice in the matter – this game is crap.
