A game with decently made hidden object scenes, but which unfortunately suffers some technical issues.
You play as Lana Vassari, a restorer just returning from vacation to find that a gang of robbers is stealing valuable paintings and returning them defaced. Galleries, auction houses and private collectors hire you to restore their paintings, while the FBI asks you to assist them in their investigation. In between restorations you get to redecorate your apartment using your earnings.
The game is entirely made up of hidden object scenes which consist of paintings from the old masters, some well-known (such as The Peasant Wedding by Pieter Bruegel the Elder), some not so much (such as unknown painting by unknown artist), to which the robbers have added additional objects which the player has to find. In general these are well-made, aside from the occasional object that is mostly hidden behind other objects, making it frustratingly hard to find. Also there is the incidental misnamed or unusually named object (for example, "poniard" is perfectly valid term for a certain type of dagger, but couldn't they have simply used the more generally known word "dagger"?), probably due to translation.
The room decoration "mini-game" is entirely superfluous. It doesn't add to the story (which there isn't that much of anyway, and is just an excuse for the existence of the hidden object scenes), and I just ended up ignoring it to get on with the next scene.
Unfortunately the game suffers several technical issues. A minor one I encountered only once was an object that could not be found. It wasn't just so well hidden that I couldn't find it, it actually wasn't there, since not even the hint function could tell me where it was located. Though annoying, this could be fixed by simply restarting the scene.
Another problem is that the game won't shut down, as the exit button in the menu does nothing. I found that the best way to quit the game is to alt-tab out of it and stop the game from the Steam client.
The most severe issue were the frequent crashes to desktop I experienced. This could get really frustrating, as these crashes tended to occur near the end of a hidden object scene when only a few items were left.
Despite these issues I would still recommend Hidden World of Art 2 to those who like hidden object scenes (which there are a ton of), as long as you don't mind having to restart the game every once in a while.
