Once Upon a Time: Little Red Riding Hood

The Good
Throughout my review I will continue referring to the other two games from the "Once Upon a Time" series and what I wrote about them. Still, "Little Red Riding Hood" stands a bit apart from them. It shares their style of graphics - and, unfortunately, some of their flaws - but it's definitely not just another copy, which could be said about "Abracadabra" and "Baba Yaga"
So, again, the graphics are really beautiful - the biggest among the few advantages of these games... The cottage of Little Red Riding Hood looks very sweet, rural and old-fashioned, elements in the forest (trees, flowers, mushrooms etc.) repeat themselves, but they look nice and much more cheerful than in the two other games...
Another feature - actually it's found in all three games in the sequences when you need to find items, but it seems more prominent in "Little Red Riding Hood", probably because there's more to click... If you click the wrong place, you are told to keep searching, but also a funny animation appears. It reminded me of the famous little animations from Humongous Entertainment games. These ones are not as creative, but often interesting - a mouse will peep out of a mousehole in the Wolf's cottage and stick out its tongue, dolls pop up from drawers in the Little Red Riding Hood's house...
You can choose the protagonist and anyway all will end well: if the wolf eats both the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood, they will be saved by a hunter, just like in the original story, if I remember well... However, Little Red Riding Hood seems to have that little bit of a tough girl attitude. She is candy-sweet and naive, but (when you're playing as her) she just smacks the bees with her basket and she can kick the wolf's ass and be proud of it.

The Bad
Generally, the game has different modes and at first I didn't know how to play it... It can be disorienting: some scenes are played with the mouse and some with the keyboard. About the action sequences in the forest: they are different from the ones in "Abracadabra" and "Baba Yaga" and I can't decide if it's good or not... They are much easier, but another problem still remains: they aren't interesting. Take out that little thrill which was offered by the difficulty level of those sequences in the abovementioned two games and what remains is just boring...

The Bottom Line
The game is a little better than the other two in the series - first of all, it's distinct and the other two, being not very inventive twin games, just parasitize on each other. However, it doesn't mean it's very good or educational. Still the only thing that truly defends the series, at least partially, is its high graphic quality... "Little Red Ridding Hood", being separate from the other two games, at least doesn't copy graphics because it has nothing to copy from.
So again: the whole series is a wasted opportunity. It had at least some of the conditions: a general idea of making (slightly) educational games based on fairy tales, talented graphic artists... However, the whole thing just didn't succeed. Perhaps the whole team worked in a hurry - all three games seem in some way cut short, as if some deadline was drawing close and there was no time to develop the games more... It's a pity - if they allowed themselves more time to develop them - and just to think about it! - the whole series could have been very different: more interesting, perhaps longer and free from its major flaws such as repeating graphics and ideas to save time.