Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch Review

On a quest to recover Alexander the Great’s timeless and mysterious Scroll of Wealth, fearless archaeologist and adventurer Samantha Swift realizes that there’s more to this mission than she first thought. Now she’s racing against the clock to keep ancient magical powers from falling into the wrong hands! Discover the truth about King Midas in this exciting Hidden Object game, Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch!

– Big Fish Games

 

 

Story: Too complicated. I can’t explain. Suffice to know that it is impossible to digest it without playing the previous version. Samantha Swift is the daughter of renowned archaeologists, and the story involves her stopping an Indian lady from restoring Midas’ curse onto the world. Play this game of crossing and double-crossing to find out more! It is just too complicated, and sadly, not well presented.

Gameplay: Samantha Swift is a well done, pretty addicting game. The Hidden Object Puzzles are easy due to the colourful, broadly drawn scenes. In every scenario, you have a few really hidden objects, where you have to use some rescued objects together with something in the scene to unearth the objects in question. And Samantha Swift combines with it some of the tougher puzzles available at the moment in HOG games. Very few of them, if any, are easy. However, the instructions are clear and precise in most cases, so they shouldn’t be a sweat.

An interesting addition to the game is the Museum. You can collect objects of archaeological interest from all around the world and arrange them in your own spacious museum, in case you want to look at them or learn about their history later. Now that’s a new among history based games!

You are provided with a smart iPda to keep track of your game: you can quit, look up your contacts, visit your museum and stuff like that. This is not very new, just that you can change your skin easily and customize your sleek and modern communication device yourself.

The Hint system is fabulous here. I guess the developers themselves were tired of having to search every last pixel for objects and instead wanted to keep the players’ concentration upon the game and the story. So you can keep collecting and using the official “lightning bolt” hints as much and as long as you want. But you’ll hardly ever need them – for there is a system of unofficial hints on your Scanner! Yessir, just click on an item, and the Scanner will point out the object like a metal detector. Without a single penalty! Now I really wonder why it was called hidden object at all…

Another plus point: Samantha Swift has no timer.

Ambience: The Golden Touch has expectedly good graphics. The animation is the cheap cel type, but there aren’t many animated portions around, so I don’t think it matters much. Each scenario has its own unique music – like India, Ethiopia, Jerusalem, Russia, etc. Nothing to write home about that either.

Bottomline: This is yet another awesome solid puzzle cum hidden object game published by Big Fish Games. Maybe the only reason I don’t give it something higher is its unnecessarily complicated and detached story, and maybe because of the short length. I mean, come one, it should’ve been more than just finding six vials and a few scrolls!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5