Review: Carmen Sandiego Gets Lost in Repetition

Carmen Sandiego is one of the world’s most beloved edutainment game series. Somehow, this spy game that secretly tries to teach kids about geography is still going. After the 2019 animated series from Netflix, here is an adaptation of that series taking it back to its video game roots.

On the surface, the new Carmen Sandiego might not have much to do with the original Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. The trailers all show cool action sequences and puzzle-solving, painting a picture of a game where our titular heroine undergoes cool heists and saves the day. Do not believe the lies. This is, despite the flashy Netflix presentation, the same Carmen Sandiego kids in the 90s played to learn the capital of Uganda. Mostly.

If you’re unaware how the Carmen Sandiego game series works, you are a detective with the ACME agency, on the hunt for master thieves across the world. An artifact has been stolen, and you must track who stole it and where in the world they are. In each location, you find clues. These come in two forms – clues to where the suspect went, and clues to who they are. The latter are usually things like eye color or favorite food, both of which can be cross-referenced with the agency’s files to narrow down the suspect. The meat of this is in the location clues though, which mostly consist of real-world facts about the possible destinations.

Carmen herself was one of the master thieves you were trying to track down in the original game. However, this game is based on the Netflix series, where she is now Sly Cooper for some reason. Still a master thief, just one that goes after other criminals. So instead of trying to find her, you play as her as she hunts down the other suspects.

This is where all the fancy stuff comes in. In the original game, you’d click on a location within each city you travel to and get a clue. Now you have to work for that clue, usually via a point-and-click segment where you speak to people and investigate suspicious parts of the environment. Sometimes this will be replaced with a minigame, such as a QTE, a safe-cracking minigame, a gliding game or something similar.  Either way, the clue is your reward for completing these segments successfully.

The point-and-click segments are decent. They’re a little simplistic, but they do add a nice extra layer of interactivity. The minigames, however, are a mixed bag. Any of the QTE style minigames are generally tedious and a reminder of why we should be grateful games stopped relying on them years ago. The safe cracking is fine but nothing special. The hang-gliding minigame should be great but is marred with control issues. On top of these problems, all the minigames come with the stink of mobile game ranking systems. A gaudy star meter hovers nearby in almost all of them, assessing your performance. Gameloft should have just stuck to making this a straightforward adventure game, but I guess these minigames look more exciting in a trailer.

Despite the issues with the minigames, the actual mystery solving of Carmen Sandiego starts out interesting. The geographic clues proved to be genuinely challenging to figure out. The suspect database was fun to work with. The time limit inherent to every case also applies a decent level of pressure to figure out the answers quickly.

However, it doesn’t take long before you’ve seen everything Carmen Sandiego has to offer. The number of cities you can travel to is pathetically small, consisting of maybe two cities per continent. A similar problem happens with the clues themselves, which frequently default to “the airport code contains this letter” above any other option. These are the least interesting, as I can figure out a suspect went to Tokyo when they visit a ryokan, but I’m never remembering either of the city’s major airport codes. What’s worse, I eventually started getting that specific clue two times per city, and it sucked all fun out of the mystery solving.

Progressing through the story of Carmen Sandiego exacerbates this. Remember I said you get assessed on a 5-star system on every minigame like it’s a generic mobile game? This style of design seeps into progression too, where unlocking new stages is based on your current level, but simply playing the game normally never awards enough XP. Instead, you constantly have play stripped down versions of the main stages that remove the minigames and presentation. Usually multiple times because these also give a tiny amount of XP compared to what you need to level up. It’s so tedious that I half expected a store page to pop up saying I could skip the grind by purchasing some special XP packs.  This didn’t happen in my review build but don’t be surprised if it sneaks into the final release since it feels cynically designed for it.

The result of all this repetition is a miserable experience buried under some decent presentation. At first I was willing to accept a lot of this simplicity as the game being intended for younger audiences. However, a cursory glance at the original Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? exposes further problems with the new game. The original game saw you drowning in cities across all continents, and the level of detail the clues went into required a lot more research and learning than the new game’s obsession with remembering three letters used by baggage handlers. The original game felt like a suitable challenge for a child but also capable of feeding them a ton of knowledge.

Carmen Sandiego does improve a lot from the original design, admittedly. Clues are retained in an easy-to-reference notebook. The suspect database is streamlined and easy to work with. The presentation is excellent, with decent visuals and a superb jazzy soundtrack that enhances the detective vibes. However, where it really matters, this new game is an inferior experience. The limited scope of locations and clues coupled with tedious progression turn the game into a slog, and it doesn’t even have the educational value for young audiences that the original does.

Ultimately, I came away from this new Carmen Sandiego game feeling frustrated. The strong basic mechanics and presentation are let down with baffling progression and repetition. You’d be better off playing the original in a browser for free. At least you might learn something there.

The new Carmen Sandiego game is out now for Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and mobile devices via Netflix.