Where's Wally? Travel Pack 2 Review (DSiWare)

Last week, we saw Ludia’s attempt at bringing the highly popular Where’s Wally series to DSiWare with Where’s Wally? Travel Pack 1 in Europe, a version of the full DS title Where’s Waldo? The Fantastic Journey. While it proved to be fun at times, the game’s downloadable release has forced it to be cut down into episodic format so as to fit the service's space limitations. This left Travel Pack 1 very short in length, and the experience felt very limited. And for Where’s Wally? Travel Pack 2, it’s the same story.

There are just two modes on offer again, Story and Party, which are largely the same as before. For the second Travel Pack, Ludia has included a new but brief story introduction continuing from the previous game, so it’s not a completely lazy transition into an episodic format, but they've unfortunately left out extra features such as the ability to share save files between the releases.

There are still three difficulty settings to choose from, affecting the size of your searching space and how near to your object that the game automatically places your focus, and there's still the same variety of different missions available – finding people and objects, spotting the difference between two pictures, that sort of thing. The ranking system is still here, grading your performance in stars depending on how fast you complete a mission. Like before, while it offers some replay value, it doesn't add much to the game in the long term and your tasks begin to get repetitive and tedious after continued playthroughs.

Just like before, there are only nine missions available across three new areas. These can be completed in less than an hour, which is disappointing and gives the player little value for their money. Nothing new has been added for these missions either, but this is more understandable given how Ludia has adapted the game into an episodic style. It can still be fun at times, and if you enjoyed the first Travel Pack then you're likely to enjoy this as well, but for those who weren't convinced the first time around, there's nothing here which will change your mind this time.

The two player party mode, as before, splits players into two different teams, Red and Blue, giving each their own Star Meter which increases whenever they locate the items for which they're looking. Once filled up, Wally will reveal himself and whoever finds him first wins, which is simple enough. However, one of the main problems we had before with the mode was that it doesn't support DS Download Play and could only be played between two DSi's with a copy of the game. This remains the same for the second travel pack, sadly.

The game is controlled via the touch screen, using the stylus to scroll along the level and find your mission objective, and the method still feels like a natural fit for the game. The graphics naturally retain the same style as the previous pack, sticking that of the book series. However, a lot of the time you'll find yourself looking at still image of admittedly outdated-looking art, which isn't very interesting. As for the game's audio, it's still pretty much the same story as before – bearable but quite generic and not too interesting.