Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math: The Big Ben Burglary Review

The criminal queen of edutainment gaming was revived on WiiWare just a couple of weeks ago, as the new Adventures in Math series reimagined the classic gameplay of chasing Carmen Sandiego around the world by mashing up old-school Carmen detective sequences with some new Professor Layton-like math puzzles. That first release -- The Lady Liberty Larceny -- offered only one case for aspiring A.C.M.E. detectives to crack, though. Now The Big Ben Burglary offers the second.

The gameplay here is exactly the same as before -- you control a secret agent walking around and interviewing witnesses, use the Wii Remote to point at the screen to find clues and occasionally are taken to a standalone puzzle seen where you have to do something like re-create a visual pattern or do some currency calculations. Feel free to bounce over to Lady Liberty Larceny's longer review for a more thorough description if you like -- just sub in "London's Big Ben" for "New York's Statue of Liberty" as the current stolen landmark and you're good to go.

I'm not quite as impressed with this encore as I was with that first release, though, as in her second reappearance the novelty of Carmen's revival feels diminished compared to the one key issue that's afflicting this installment as well -- length. On the one hand it makes sense for each episodic download in this series to contain just one case to solve, but when you breeze through the investigation to catching the current criminal in just a couple of hours it's hard to feel like you've gotten your money's worth.

The thin number of included puzzles -- which frequently repeat in multiplayer mode -- also makes me wonder if this game wouldn't have been better off as a budget-priced retail release bundling a bunch of cases together, instead of a handful of carved-apart and separate WiiWare downloads.

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