I kinda liked it :o)

I'm a sucker for mystery, conspiracy and/or secret society stories, and that is what you get here. The story isn't fully fleshed or in any way intricate, but rather a bit shallow and simplified. One can't help to think that they could've done a lot more to get a more fully story told, but I still found it entertaining enough.

It's an old game now, and it shows through looking at the characters, several backdrops and the cutscenes. Several are a bit blurry and low on detail. However, some backdrops looks a bit sharper. Anyway, it probably looked damn good when it came out, and it doesn't look half bad today. That is acceptable.

The voice acting is overall ok, but it lacks a bit emotion and suspence. There are several tongue-in-cheek comments from the main characters that sometime works and sometimes don't. It is hard to tell at times if the game takes itself seriously or not.

Figuring out the puzzles in this game was entertaining enough, with proper clues given and mostly quite logical solutions. Sometimes, though, they felt a bit cheap and out of context. The locations you go to are also mostly interesting.

The game as a whole seems based on a good foundation, but a bit rushed and inconsistent. The coincidences within the story is a bit too much to swallow. I'm sure it is probably based on time and budget like most others. Either way it is still entertaining enough to enjoy if you are into these sorts of things.

I also played the first in the series and enjoyed that one as well. There are a few references to the previous game but you certainly don't need to play that one to enjoy this. It is a whole seperate storyline.

I can absolutely recommend this game for fans of point'n'click adventure games and for people who like a bit of mystery. If you're not into these types of games to begin with, it is probably not going to change your mind.

I rate it 6/10, because it has aged a bit and has that thin storyline. If I had played it when it came out and rated it at the time it might have been rated a bit higher.

As always. If you are looking into buying this, don't base your decision on this review alone. Others-, any your opinion might differ from mine.

Happy gaming :o)

TJ

I enjoyed the first one, though many of the flaws are still present in the sequel. The voice acting is atrocious, with dialogue seemingly dragging on forever with pointless conversations that really don't need to be as long as they are.

The puzzles are... random and often don't make sense. I've played a lot of point-and-click adventures over the years, but even I had to resort to reading walkthroughs occasionally. Rather than solving puzzles through logic, often it is a simple case of clicking on every item in your inventory until one of them works.

What’s better

• Backgrounds looks much better and are animated
  
• Character graphics are a little bit better … but just a little bit

What’s worse

• VOICE ACTING !!! – What definitely was the worst part of previous installment actually got even worse. Voices of secondary characters are ok but main cast will probably annoy you as hell. Sometimes they can sound pretty decent but most of the time dialogs (and monologs) are WAY overreacted or use completely wrong intonation for given scene.
  
• Some illogical puzzles – not much but still. Plus for me one case of pixel hunting (yes even with hotspot highlighting)
  
• Plot is still ok but weaker then in predecessor

I SO wanted to like this game. Everything about it screamed ADVENTURE GAME! The graphics are beautiful. The story seemed interesting and there are some parts where you pick-up objects, talk to people and navigate through scene based puzzles, what could be better, right? Well that's what I thought. But that's where it ends. First of all there are limited scenes, so many times you find yourself backtracking and worse yet clicking objects too early which makes you believe you did the wrong thing; yet clicking on that same object a bit later is what's called for. This is beyond frustrating. Then the game has you combine ridiculous items that make no sense, not even within the game itself, telling us that the only one(s) it made sense to, was the game's author(s). There are times when you run around stumped for 5-10-15-20 minutes only to have to consult a walkthrough. There are even times when you did the right thing, but have to exit and re-enter a scene to have any effect! The puzzles try to be clever only to fail miserably. Too bad because this game seemed to have so much potential, but it's just wasted on pointless puzzles without any reward. A good example is in the jungle, the door puzzle's riddle says the EYE looks down on all. Okay so that would be the TOP slot. And the only object with an EYE is the PEACOCK FEATHER. But that's NOT where it goes! Super frustrating. Where the hell is the logic behind that?!! Ridiculous.

I finished the first Secret Files on the Wii, and I have to say that Part 2 so far is much nicer. The graphics are much better and the controls on the mouse are much easier to use. I like how the game ties into part 1 nicely.

I was really glad when the game started and the voices were different. But, while in the first game they were insufferable (cheery and full of excess energy without reason), in this one I still needed some getting used to them, because they were on the opposite end of the spectrum: They were totally bland and made the characters seem apathetic. I was expecting Nina to utter "Why do I even bother?"!

There was again a plethora of riddles (logical and illogical) and I've found it a bit refreshing actually, that half the game seems to have mundane, every day objectives. When we get to the grand ideas and plots many games (as well as this one) lose their charm.

The dynamic between Nina and Max is better in this game. As their relationship is already established from the previous one, we get to see how it evolves. Oh, and Max has become way more handsome! :D

What I didn't like was the casual misogyny. Of the 4 women in the game, 2 were playable characters (Nina and Sam), the 3rd (Katharina Jordan) was described as a "bimbo" from Nina, (also Sam mentions another "bimbo"), and the 4th (the police officer in Paris) as "average in all respects", and "ugly". Way to go Nina for your stance towards other women!

Also, breaking the 4th wall can be fun, but Nina kinda overdid it. Too many references that we're playing a game. We know we are, so enough already...

All in all, it is a more than decent game, and I even liked it quite a bit more than the first one.

Very good aventure game. Not overly difficult, but not just dialog and finding and combining objects either. With patience it is solvable, a few puzzles are annoying and not obvious. At no point will the game get so discouraging that you'll end up giving up and using a walkthrough to get through the whole thing.

The game is funny when it wants to be, and dramatic too. Overall this is a great adventure. Highly recommended. I'd already played Tunguska, and I'm looking forward to Secret Files 3 based on this game.

Did see wierd bug where the characters walked being the background image sometimes. This is noticeable in one of the first areas, there is an infirmary on the ship and I saw it there as well as a few other places. Might be video card specific. Not bad, but just in case you end up looking at a screen and wondering why characters are talking but nothing is there, that's why.

After experiencing the first game in the series with somewhat charming graphics and a mediocre story at best I expected the sequel to be an improved version of its predecessor. Unfortunately what happened is disappointment. The game applies the logic of classic point & click games, where even the simplest task is stretched into a long sequence of nonsensical puzzles. You can forgive a game such approach, if the storytelling is worth it. Unfortunately that’s not the case here. The first part of the game drags on unnecessarily, and by the midpoint it feels like forcing yourself through mud without any particular goal in mind. At the time of writing this review I still haven't finished the story because the end part is so atrociously stretched and doesn't offer any motivation for me as the player to see its blatantly obvious conclusion.

Update: After a long break from the game I managed to finish it. As long as you help yourself with a walkthrough the game isn't that bad. It has a kind of unexpected comedic element right when the story ends, but it doesn't fit the game overall. Ultimately the ending made the game more bearable to me. It still isn't enough for me to recommend it to anyone, though.

I love point and click adventure games and there are only three things that make me downvote a point and click adventure game:

1. Poor controls
2. Gamebreaking bugs
3. Illogical puzzles

After playing Secret Files 2, I realized that there was a fourth:

4. Even worse writing

The writing in this game is what earned it the down vote. All dialogue sounds like it was written by a single person and read by many voices. All the characters have pretty much the same personality. All of them try to be funny and the inane rambling gets tiresome really quick. I mean, instead of a simple "I can't do that." when trying to do something would suffice. But does Secret Files 2 do that? No, the character will go off on a long tirade which feels endless. Couple that with horrible voice acting with fake accents, lines that are read rather than acted, and the endless attempts at humor and you get one simply awful point and click adventure game.

To be fair though, the game has some good puzzles, graphics aged alright, and the story is alright. Some puzzles can be a bit stupid though. Seriously, how do I know what slugs like?

This is a pitiful excuse for a game and a disgrace for the genre. I clawed my way through it, and by the time I was halfway through I was THIS close to going insane from:

-) the lousy voice acting
-) the wannabe funny dialogues, that end up being nothing short of awkwardly bad
-) the ludicrous story and
-) the disastrous "riddles".

Here's a random example of the latter: Find random "noisemaker" on the ground at a zoo, use it to lure a pair of DUCKS halfway through Paris back to the Zoo so that the zookeeper will give you one of the baguettes he's convieniently sharing to feed them, give baguette to homeless man who apparently spent his entire life waiting for such a selfless act and immediately turns sober so that you can have his old booze, which you then use to be incarcerated for being drunk only to bust back out 5 minutes later with about the lamest of explanations).

In short, this game tries, it really does. But it just falls short in pretty much every aspect that make an adventure game good, and just makes for a very tedious experience of about 4 hours from start to finish. Avoid if you can.