Despite the short playtime at the time of writing this review, I have already spent 15.4 hours testing the latest demo version and a few more hours on older test and web versions.
This is a beautiful game that consists of three very different parts:
- Firstly, you have to deliver packages from one country to another while crossing as few borders as possible. If you find the route (or one of them) with the fewest hops, you get a star. With these stars, you automatically unlock higher levels with longer and more difficult routes. You can also use them to unlock other continents.
- As you deliver each package, you collect puzzle pieces along the way (you take photos of the area) by trying to drive over them with your delivery truck.
- In your photo albums, you can then put the collected puzzle pieces together to create beautiful (AI) paintings.
• Finding the route
The game basically starts in Europe. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, because even for me as a European, finding the routes here is much more difficult than in the "Americas" (South and North America are combined into one continent in this game). You click your way through country by country and are always shown all the neighboring countries of the country you are currently in. This makes the game not particularly difficult from the start. It is then made even easier by the fact that you can go back step by step without penalty or simply start the route from the beginning. It is quite obvious that the aim of this game is not to push you to the limits of your abilities. Rather, it is about getting to know the world - at least the location of the many different countries in the world - a little better in a fun and entertaining way. And even if the game is designed more for children, this is something that could do us all good.
You reach the second level on each continent long before you have completed the tasks of the first level. This means that it is possible to tackle more difficult tasks early on if you are not challenged by the easy ones. Unfortunately, you do not get more stars for completing tasks at higher levels, nor do you get any other advantages in the game.
With just 15 stars you can buy the first additional continent. This is particularly suitable for all players who are not from Europe and therefore perhaps want to try out familiar terrain first. In addition to the Americas, Asia and Africa are available for this. Since Australia only consists of two countries (Australia and New Zealand), I think it is understandable that the developer did not add this.
• "Photographing" (collecting the puzzle pieces)
Every time you successfully complete a task, you drive your van a short distance along a straight country road, on which a lot of jigsaw puzzle pieces are scattered around. You use the mouse to steer left and right to collect as many of them as possible. You don't need to pay attention to traffic rules, as fortunately there are no oncoming traffic or guard rails. You can shorten this sequence by right-clicking and thus receive a randomly determined number of puzzle pieces.
I think this part of the game only exists to explain the subsequent jigsaw puzzles. To be honest, I usually skip it with the autcollect function.
• The photo albums
With autocollect you get between 15 and 23 pieces, if you collect them yourself, the result ranges across a much wider spectrum. The pieces usually belong to one of the next three puzzles in the album.
As soon as you have received at least 1 piece of a puzzle, you can open the puzzle in the album and try to connect the existing pieces. Of course, you can only finish it when you have all 64 pieces.
You gradually get a gallery of 18 pictures for each continent, each of which is typical of its continent in its own way.
Unfortunately, these are all AI-generated paintings, which to a large extent seem to serve already known clichés rather than actually showing the essence of the region in question and real existing architecture and landscape features.
I don't know to what extent it would have been feasible (and above all affordable) to obtain the rights to real photographs for this game. The educational approach of the game could only have benefited from this in any case.
• Conclusion
The game's controls, rules and game principles are very easy to understand.
The entire presentation - the design, the fonts and icons - is soft and easy on the eyes and is therefore also well suited for children imo.
Finding out where so many countries you've heard of are and what other countries you've never heard of exist can be really exciting. But once you know, the game loses its excitement and quickly becomes repetitive. The appeal that remains is actually remembering the position of these countries and finding the "shortest" routes over and over again (which aren't always the shortest, since it's the number of borders that count, not the distance traveled).
This game is a pleasant and relaxing pastime that you can actually take back into real life. Later in the game, you can mostly decide freely whether you want to do puzzles or find routes, and which continent you want to play on.
I miss a freeplay mode a little and maybe the possibility to compete with others. The latter, of course, not online, but via an alternating multiplayer mode - perhaps even with up to four players.
As already mentioned above, I think it's a bit sad that instead of real photos of real buildings and real nature, only artificial imitations (albeit really pretty ones) made it into the game, and collecting the puzzle pieces seems a bit forced, but you can at least skip that.
All in all, I give the game a solid 8 out of 10.
