The History Channel: Lost Worlds

Moby ID: 34172

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Critic Reviews add missing review

Average score: 36% (based on 4 ratings)

Player Reviews

Average score: 2.3 out of 5 (based on 6 ratings with 1 reviews)

This kind of edutainment does not work, at least not for me.

The Good
I got this game in a three game compilation, it was old and I did not have high hopes but they installed under Windows 10 and ran flawlessly.

The game consists of rounds of spot the difference games, hidden object games and jigsaw puzzles each of which is preceded by a screen of text and followed by a trivia question. These games are all timed with the speed of completion contributing to the player's bonus score.
Overall the games were pretty good. I found the spot the difference games were really tricky with, for example, tiny differences in the size of an object being the hardest kind of difference to spot.
The jigsaws are all similar where the player has to assemble a photographic image, sounds easy but really it's not.
Finally the spot-the-difference puzzles are a challenge because they are well designed and, to be honest, because the resolution is not as good as in modern games.

The Bad
There was educational text content but it was, well in my opinion, patchy. For example there is a lot of material on the Mesoamerican empires but less for the Roman empire which the game itself describes as the greatest and longest lasting empire of all.
For me what is worse is that when the game is replayed all this text is skipped and the player is presented with just a series of puzzles they have already completed. Great for getting a high score but, I think, a missed educational opportunity.

At the end of a round is a multiple choice question that also contributes to the player's bonus. I got a few of these wrong and I swear the question had not been covered in the text.

The Bottom Line
I played this game a day or so ago and, being honest once again, I can remember nothing about the educational content. I do remember that when I played the game I was conscious that the content was stuff I either learned at school sixty years ago or stuff I just absorbed. There is really very little content and what there is is very high level - think summarising five hundred years of history into a single screen. There were some new names, the odd pharaoh or an Aztec/Mayan leader that I hadn't heard of but most of the 'new' content did not register. Bizarrely what I do remember are the jigsaw puzzles, the Roman arrow slinging thing, the Mayan temple, the Egyptian tomb and others.

TLDR: Decent puzzles, play this game for them.

Windows · by piltdown_man (235179) · 2023

Contributors to this Entry

Critic reviews added by vicrabb, Scaryfun.