Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 by Nick Maunders

The second instalment to the Professor Layton series on the DS has had quite a lot of publicity leading up to its release date but is it necessary? Does it live up to the hype it’s been getting? Well I think that it definitely does that, it might even be better than it’s supposed to be!

For anyone who hasn’t played the first game you missed out on a good one. But although there were over 150 puzzles it was a little bit repetitive because you were basically stuck in the small village. However with this new game there are many different scenes all of which have been created to perfection.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box (or Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box as it is known in America and Japan) has a brilliant storyline in which you have to find out the cause of “Pandora’s box”. It seems that when people open it they end up dead so you have to work out if the cause is because of the box or because of something else. Character’s returning include Professor Layton (obviously!) and Luke but there are also many new characters which you will meet along the way … not all of them are nice.

With a new game comes a new set of puzzles and how the creators have managed to come up 150 brand new brilliant puzzles is amazing. There is a lot more variety between the puzzles such as fitting objects into a certain area, maths problems and of course the old sliding puzzles. There are also some visual puzzles in which you’re given some text and an image. Using the text you must find the right point on the image. The brilliant thing about the game is that even if you get it wrong over and over again it doesn’t matter. You can get 3 hints on a puzzle and after you’ve found the answer you may start kicking yourself realising how easy some of them are. Some of the puzzles can be quite daunting and some downright evil, that’s why you need to save your hint coins because you’ll never know when a near impossible puzzle pops up and you need some help.

Instead of building a robot dog, a picture and decorating each others rooms in the first game this time there are three brand new sub-missions. One is a rather pointless, but quite fun, minigames of helping an obese hamster lose weight. You have to work out a series of problems to get the hamster to travel the furthest to its food. Another game is creating a camera in which you can use to take pictures and the final minigames is brewing cups of tea which can actually help in the game. You just give a certain type of tea to a person and hey presto! They tend to help you more.

The game has sold over 800,000 copies in Japan which shows how good a game it is. Although just because a game has sold a lot of copies it doesn’t mean it’s good. On this occasion thought it does. Having been out for just 2 days in Europe I suspect many people have already got it right now. If you haven’t though I wouldn’t wait around, it may even be out of stock now.

With the new story and brilliant puzzles I would have to rate the game 92%.

Posted in DS Reviews