Professor Layton & Pandora's Box (DS)

Gamecow’s Price	RRP $69.95     Save $7.00 $62.95
Availability
Genre	General
Platform	Nintendo DS
Release Date	24/09/2009
Rated

Professor Layton & Pandora's Box (DS) Product Information

A New Mystery is Afoot

Puzzle master Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, have stumbled upon another mystery. It’s up to them to navigate their way through numerous puzzles to determine who – or what – caused the death of Professor Layton’s mentor, Dr. Schrader. Was it the mysterious Elysian Box, rumoured to kill all who open it? Professor Layton and Luke find a clue that begins their adventure: a train ticket for the Molentary Express.

FEATURES:

• Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box features a riveting new mystery and more than 150 new brain teasers, riddles and logic puzzles to challenge and delight players.
• Beyond the puzzles found in the game, players with a broadband Internet connection who connect their Nintendo DS and Nintendo DSi systems to Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection will get access to downloadable bonus puzzles. A new puzzle will be available each week for 33 weeks after the game launches.
• The new game includes a significantly greater amount of voice work and animated movie scenes compared to the original.

Professor Layton & Pandora's Box (DS) Review

Professor Layton is back in his second western release Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box. Fans of The Curious Village have no doubt been highly anticipating the chance to have another crack at the professor’s brainteasers for the past year and a half. While the series has been an overwhelming success in Japan, it is still trying to find a break in the English speaking markets. For those who didn’t play the first game, it is essentially a series of puzzles that’ll have you racking your brain using maths and linguistic skills, along with intuition and logic to find the solution.

Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box, or And the Diabolical Box as it’s known in the US, is a sequel but doesn’t follow on directly from its predecessor. In fact there’s no need to play Curious Village at all, as the story is crafted as a game in its own right. We are informed that a mysterious item – the Elysian Box – is responsible for the death of one of the professor’s dearest friends. Layton and his slightly annoying sidekick, Luke, set off on a journey around Europe to discover more about the strange item, as any good archaeologists would. From here the story gets more obscure, and really completely pointless. You’ll find yourself investigating murders, finding lost children and getting involved in trivial problems that the locals seem to find extremely important. As you progress further the main storyline begins to make less sense, and almost starts to become irrelevant. Fortunately it pretty much is, as the puzzles and gameplay is what Professor Layton is all about.

Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box is set-up like a good ol’ fashion point and click adventure. You walk around - that is to say you are presented with a stationary scene from a first person perspective, and click on items of interest with your stylus moving from area to area. The Professor and Luke are presented with puzzles either through running into an important character, finding a local in a predicament, or simply reminiscing about something and challenging the other with a puzzle to fill in time. All in all there are 150 puzzles in a campaign that’ll take you roughly around 10 hours to complete if you race through it. Many of these are side quests, and not required to progress, so the game could easily take up to 15 hours if you want to walk away with a prefect record.

Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box transforms your DS into a collection of brain-testing puzzles. You’ll be faced with many a conundrum, as this is by no means an easy game. Almost every puzzle will test you, some will frustrate you, and some will reward your hard effort, but most importantly you’ll want to keep playing. With anywhere between 10-15 hours of gameplay, depending on how many of the 150 puzzles you complete, Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box is a must for anyone looking for a challenging, but rewarding, puzzle game.

Full review MYDS