What do you think of when you hear the name Carmen Sandiego? Chances are you have likely heard this name before and you associate it with crime, solving cases, the red hat and jacket that so many old-school gamers would recognize anywhere. “Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?” Is a statement I remember reading and hearing quite a bit when I was a kid. I remember how fun it was to put that CD-ROM into that Radio Shack 2000 Compaq Presario PC running the glitchy Windows 95/98 software (yes, I’m telling my age now) and just enjoy the cases for however long I could stand solving them. 

If you remember the old Carmen Sandiego series, prepare yourself for the new one titled “Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition.” This new game is all about bringing back the nostalgia with some new twists and turns, of course. I first saw a Facebook ad about this game and that’s how I found out that a new Carmen game was coming out. At that time I took a screenshot of the Facebook ad and just saved it in my records as a “check this out later” thing. Originally, I remember that when this Deluxe Edition first came out, it was only for Netflix customers as an original Netflix game. At that time I had ceased my subscription to Netflix so I wasn’t able to play it; when I finally got Netflix back due to a TV series a friend encouraged me to see, the Deluxe Edition game had come to the Google Play Store. I got it there and have been playing it here and there ever since. 

So with that said, what are my thoughts on this game? Now, this question is a loaded one. I don’t intend to answer every question you would have or give every answer to the questions you may have. It’s a large download with a lot of facets to it. Settings, new and old cases, and different levels from sleuth all the way up to “mastermind” and more. I’ll leave you to figure all that out. What I intend to do in this game review is tell you a bit of what I find to be reminiscent of the old-school, a little bit of the new-school, as well as a bit of what I find frustrating about this game and what future revisions may or may not need. 

If you’re like me, and you loved the Carmen Sandiego cases, you just wanna download the game and start playing and enjoy it like we did back in the former days. All the new features may be a lot to take in at once; in the days when these cases were on CD-ROM and there was no mobile Play Store or smartphones, we were just grateful to have something educational to keep us busy. That’s the approach I take to this game now. Some will find the new features to be welcome and appreciate those, but I wanna tailor my focus to the cases themselves. 

I am of the mindset that if you get the cases right for players, everything else will follow. 

1. Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition: What’s To Like?

One thing I like about this new Deluxe Edition is the old-school nostalgic nod to the previous Carmen Sandiego game(s) with the arcade graphics. Going into the ACME files will allow you to play the nostalgia cases where most of the screen is “black” except for 3 places you investigate each time you land in a new country. In that regard, you feel right at home when playing the old-school cases. The new-school cases have better graphics, considering they are more life-like. The old-school graphics are more utilitarian and don’t involve the 3D designs of the 21st century. If you are an old-school gamer, you remember what even basketball games were like: how the players themselves were virtually stick figures at a distance, with as few details as possible. 3D graphics have allowed players to become multidimensional with attention to details such as the number stitched on a player’s jersey or even a player’s distinct hairstyle and eye color. 

The new-style graphics for the new cases (not the old ones in the Deluxe Edition) allow Carmen to even hang-glide to and from building rooves when catching criminals. The old-school graphics and cases did not allow for that, but I found it to be enjoyable. Basically, you wait until the mechanism centers and turns “green,” then you press it and boom – you’re flying from one set of buildings to another set with a criminal in your sights. It’s actually a neat feature of the new-school graphics. 

Carmen checks out cars, files, and scenes: new-school graphics allow for more interactive gameplay

I mentioned the hang-gliding above, which helps Carmen catch criminals. It also creates more interactive gameplay for players that takes it beyond the classic, one-dimensional approach. You get more up-close and personal time with settings and scenes. You can see Carmen’s eyes and the red hat and jacket she wears more closely than before (you can see its design style now instead of just thinking “oh yeah, Carmen has a red hat and jacket”). Carmen has some other red clothing as well, other jacket choices, that she will don from time to time. In the game settings you can change Carmen’s general appearance. She’s got a jacket she wears in warmer temps too, as well as her usual long jacket. Carmen also dons shorts if you select this avatar from the settings menu. She’s not the same “stuffed jacket” Carmen you may remember (although, I must say: I do love seeing her classic hat and jacket). 

The interactive gameplay allows for some great entertainment for new-school and old-school gamers alike. For example, when Carmen enters a scene and sees a VILE member, she can hide in the scene and then “sneak up” on the criminal, too. Carmen can open vans and pull out boxes that bring to light hidden clues. She can also disable drones, open vaults, pickpocket thieves to find documents, and so on. This interactive gameplay makes you feel like you are truly Carmen Sandiego, using your skills to bring criminals to justice. 

As a help to law enforcement, Carmen puts her former skills to use, unlocking safes by finding the correct codes, adjusting wavelengths in order to open devices and find hidden files, and completing mazes to the same end. Carmen even learns how to unlock mechanisms in order to access information the bad guys store in what they believe are secure boxes. Carmen breaks through them, but that’s where the player comes in: the player is the one doing it. So basically, you’re experiencing all these things through the “eyes” of Carmen Sandiego herself. 

2. One Glaring Omission: Research Database

In the midst of all this, however, there is one glaring omission: there is no research database, no integrated Web browser, no ACME Crime Browser of some kind to research places, landmarks, and clues. Wanna find Isalo National Park? Visit Kangaroo Island? Canoe down the Amazon River? Buy Lederhosen? See a Quokka? Eat a Lamington? Study Mapuche Culture? Visit the Dachschund Museum? If so, get ready to leave the game every time you need to find some info – unless you’re a lucky guesser. There is no integrated crime browser of any kind, no search engine, by which you are able to research these details given in your investigation. So with that said, I had to leave the game and go back to my favorite web browser each time I didn’t know what location I needed to travel to next. 

I have been playing this Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition game on my Samsung Galaxy A56, which is said to be a typical low-cost consumer smartphone. This smartphone has 8GB of RAM. The normal resources to run this system take 5GBs, even when there are no apps open. So with that said, you put this 1.5GB+ game in play and it will reload due to the intensive RAM situation. I’ve been playing this game since February of this year (6 months now) but this past week was the first week that I noticed the game reloading every other game play attempt. And I have 120GBs of memory left on the device to store photos, texts, screenshots, etc. Outside of the RAM situation, I don’t see a reason for this game to reload so frequently; however, before playing this game, the phone was the same RAM hog it is now and other apps weren’t reloading frequently. Other games weren’t reloading this frequently, either. 

Without a crime browser/research database/integrated Web browser of some kind, prepare for the frustration of exiting the app to research a landmark, then returning to the game. And if your phone works like mine, the game will “reboot” to remind you that you’ve had to endure all this. I truly think this is the most glaring omission for such a research-heavy game. How can you investigate clues if you don’t have a research database? How do you know what “f-stop” is in a clue without one? How would you know that croquet was the most popular game in the 1800s without one, unless you’ve learned it from somewhere in life? 

This game appears to be renovated in some sense to appeal to younger generations, newer generations who don’t recognize the old-school, one-dimensional graphics of the older gameplay. If you’re gonna appeal to the younger generations, you have to make the game a one-stop shop for crime solving. Leaving out a research database is not the way to achieve that. I hope in future updates that the game maker considers this a top priority. 

3. Not Enough Time: Investigating Scenes, Asking Questions, Finding Clues

Last but never least, there is the time allotted for each case. In many cases it is 7 days, but in some cases, it is as little as 4 days. There are cases in Carmen Sandiego: Deluxe Edition where you only have to track down a particular thief or criminal (you don’t have to find out who it is because they tell you). Those cases where you only track down a particular criminal whose name you already know are for later cases (far beyond the beginner Sleuth level, that’s for sure). For most, you will have to find out the 1) name, 2) gender, 3) eye color, 4) hair color, 5) food, 6) hobby, 7) fear, etc. And with that said, each country you land in has 3 places you can interrogate. Many interrogations are 3 or 4 hours, with additional questions for each place being 1 hour or 2 hours each. In some cases, to pry open a closed case with files requires you to untangle wires or crack the combination code, etc. And when you do, another 2 hours will pass as you seek to examine the contents of the closed briefcase or vault, etc. And guess where those 2 extra hours come from?

Your allotted time (in days) for the case. 

Then there is the factor of international travel. Every time you travel to a different country, there are so many hours you lose from your total time. If the country requires 9 hours of travel and you just started the case, you go from 7 days (168 hours) down to “6D, 15H” (6 days and 15 hours) remaining for your time. 

Now this is where the time allotted becomes a problem. Let’s say that you want to find as many clues as possible to track down the criminal. If you do, then you will ask questions in each scene of each country you investigate. But asking questions at 3 scenes may equal half a day (12 hours), not to mention additional questions you ask. If you ask initial questions at all 3 scenes (2-3 hours each; 2 x 3 = 6, 3×3 =9 hours) in a particular country, and then ask an additional question in each place, you could be looking at 9-12 hours spent in one country. So the 6 days, 24 hours of time you have now dwindles to 6.5 days remaining. Let’s say that you travel to 5 different countries outside the initial country to track down your criminal; if you do, then you’ve lost 12 hours x 5 countries = 60 hours (2.5 days) to investigation. Keep in mind though, that the countries have different amounts of time for travel: one country may be 8 hours away, another 10 hours. So with that said, you could see half of your 7 days spent traveling to these countries. By the time you investigate the scenes, you’re less than half a day away from losing the case bc you’ve nearly run out of time. 

Add to this the 2 hours you lose to get a search warrant. Oh, and if you don’t have at least 5-10 hours remaining when you arrive at a particular city to make an arrest, then you will lose the case bc “you ran out of time” and didn’t budget your time carefully. 

But you shouldn’t have to budget your time by 1) not asking questions at certain scenes, 2) running from one country after finding out next location info, 3) not confirming clues, etc. The whole point of investigating the scene is to make sure you have all your details correct when you lose another 2 hours by requesting a warrant for the criminal’s arrest. There are clues provided outright that are true and can be accepted without question. Certain clues, however, require you to “confirm clue” if you wanna find out whether it is true or not. And let me warn you: not all clues that need confirmation are true. Many are unreliable. 

And you don’t realize it when you first start. If you aim to confirm 5 clues and they are all unreliable, then you’ve lost as much as 15-20 hours off your total case time. That’s nearly a day spent on confirming 5 unreliable clues. And in losing all that time, you’re still no closer to catching the criminal than before you attempted to confirm those unreliable clues. 

I think the 2-3 days of travel you will need to solve the case (or more) should be separated from the 7 days’ time you get to spend on the case itself by investigating and asking questions. I think at least 10 days total time or even 14 days total would suffice. Though more time is always nice, I’d settle for at least 10 days instead of 7. As with the former Carmen Sandiego games, and now this new one, we need more time. 

4. Final Thoughts

Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition is a fantastic game in that it brings back the nostalgia of a beloved series that requires research and catching bad guys. I love research and I love watching the bad guys get caught (I’m a huge Law and Order fan), so this game is perfect for me. Always has been. 

And yet, there are some major frustrations with it. Not having enough time to gather all details to make accurate arrests, losing so much time behind confirming certain clues while certain others require losing more time (to confirm them) just seems like a time guzzler on what is already a small time allotment. The absence of a research database is a glaring omission that Carmen Sandiego fans of the past will surely notice without question. 

I think what the game makers set out to do was give the Carmen Sandiego series something of a “face lift”: bring in new interactive graphics (that allow Carmen to hang-glide to catch VILE thugs, for example, or untangle wires and access VILE files that betray where they’re headed or give away some detail about the criminal) that engage a new generation of gamers. I think the game maker also wanted to keep the “forever fans” happy by keeping the ACME files that allow you to play the old games with the black screen. Surely neither the old-school nor new-school crowd were offended with these side-by-side offerings. 

I just think that for all the new-school facelifting that was done, the game maker forgot to fix some of the issues with the old versions, such as the time limit issue and even the clues. There are moments when you make an arrest and all 3 potential perpetrators have the same eye color, hair color, phobia, and food, but have different hobbies; yet and still, there were few clues concerning hobbies and the majority of those require you to “confirm clue” that guzzles your case time. The absence of a research database makes me think this game was redesigned for newer generations of players: those who don’t care about “all that research and reading” and simply wanna enjoy Carmen Sandiego as an action-packed game. After all, most action games only care about catching criminals and traveling to different places. 

If that’s all you’re after, then this game is as good as it gets.

If you’re after the research, the education, and the criminal-catching, then this game is a new chapter in Carmen Sandiego. 

Nevertheless, Forever Fans would like to see a few updates in the future Deluxe Edition.

Thank you, Gameloft, for the nostalgia. We Carmen fans are grateful.