Hidden Through Time 2: Discovery Review (cookiewater cookieking1994)
A complete downgrade from the original Hidden Through Time in every single way. I very much wanted to like this game and although I did not enjoy the sequel, I wanted to give this... DLC that's not a DLC...? A chance. After completing 4 or 5 maps in less than 20 minutes, AND experiencing annoying visual bugs, I have to say I cannot recommend this to anyone.
The difficulty of the developer made maps is absurdly easy. Something that wasn't true for the original game. Unless you are a literal child, there is no challenge whatsoever. It's barely even a game. It seems to be developed solely for the purpose of allowing people to make community maps--and aside from my personal distaste at that, I have a genuine criticism to make as well: Since this is not a DLC, you can only use assets from this game in your maps. As far as I can tell, you CANNOT use any of the assets from Hidden Through Time 2, Myths & Magic (except for the ones that were recycled in this game). I believe this is probably because both of these sequel releases are very poorly optimized (tons of lag on loading screens and ridiculous loading times), but I can't say that for fact. What I can say for certain is that in the original Hidden Through Time, all of the objects from every DLC were available in the map creator.
Lastly, and this is just a personal nitpick, but I very much dislike the scale of the objects in this game. In the original, everything felt a lot smaller but the buildings felt quite large, so it had more of a classic Where's Waldo type of feel. Everything in this game feels too big and the buildings are quite small, so there isn't much room for people to create maps that really tell hilarious stories or have quite high difficulties by hiding objects really well in large maps. It just feels like the magic is totally lost. Although I am a die hard fan of the original, I will be refunding without even playing the rest of the maps.
I do not need an intro paragraph to tell me a story. The developer made maps in the original did that amazingly, and solely by using the objects to do so. Because this game has none of the soul, it's relying on words to fill in the gaps.