SEARCH ALL - CHRISTMAS

I've only played two of the Search All series of hidden object games - this one (Christmas) and the free game UFO. This game has a single large monochrome scene in which 80 candy canes have to be found; parts of the scene are animated. There is a zoom function (essential for this game as the canes can be very small and indistinct against a detailed background), and a recharging hint facility which indicates an area in which a candy cane is located. There are achievements for game progress, but they do not appear while the game is running, only at its end. I thought that the scene was well drawn and sufficiently detailed to make finding the candy canes quite difficult and challenging in a good way; in the end I had to use the hint facility to help locate the final two canes. My game play represents one playthrough. My reservation about this game is the method it uses for moving the viewpoint around the scene; instead of clicking on the background and dragging the viewpoint across the scene as most games of this genre seem to use, and which allows controlled slow movement while searching for hidden objects, the Search All series uses directional arrows at the edges of the scene. These are triggered by moving the cursor onto one of the arrows, but controlling the speed or amount of the movement is very difficult. This makes detailed methodical searching much harder. In Search All - Christmas, the candy canes are small and hard to spot, and the background is detailed, so the lack of an easy method for slow careful searching is serious. This didn't ruin the game for me, but added an unnecessary level of frustration.