iPhone

  News 
  Reviews
  Previews
  Hardware
  Interviews
  All Features

Areas

  3DS
  Android
  iPad
  iPhone
  Mac
  PC
  PlayStation 3
  PlayStation 4
  Switch
  Vita
  Wii U
  Xbox 360
  Xbox One
  Media
  Archives
  Search
  Contests

 

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy - Part 2

Score: 70%
ESRB: 4+
Publisher: Anuman
Developer: Microids
Media: Download/1
Players: 1
Genre: Adventure

Graphics & Sound:

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy - Part 2 wraps up the story of Nostradamus' daughter and her investigation into the deaths of several royals.

Like the first half of the game, Part 2's visuals do a good job capturing the feel of the 1500's. The locations you visit in this half of the game look good and definitely get the job done. A couple of new locations are visited this time around, but you shouldn't be surprised if you find yourself backtracking to some of the locations you visited in the previous installment.

The dialogue continues to be one of the game's high points as both the lines read and the voice actors do a pretty good job pushing the story forward.


Gameplay:

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy - Part 2 picks up right where the last half ended. You have the inventory items still in your possession that you should have obtained (and kept) to get to this point in the overall story, and, of course, Nostradamus' daughter, Madeleine has the ability to switch between her normal clothes and those of her brother, Cesar.

For those that might have forgotten between parts, Nostradamus is approached by the royal family to investigate a series of deaths that are befalling the house. While the astrologer himself is too old to do the task, he promises his son can investigate matters. When Madeleine points out that Cesar isn't available, he has her dress up as her brother and go out into the town in both her normal attire and Cesar's in order to get the scoop as to what exactly is going on.

I don't want to go into too much detail concerning the story so far since those who haven't played through the first part of the game could be reading this review to decide if they want to download it to their iPhone or iPad, but suffice it to say that not everything is exactly what it appears to be and there are a couple of twists in the investigation Madeleine is working on.


Difficulty:

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy - Part 2 has a few tougher puzzles in it than the first half of the game, but it still feels pretty easy overall. Again, like in the first half, I could have a skewed perspective since I had already played through Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy when it first came out and a lot of the solutions would come back to me while I was working out various puzzles. I do remember enjoying the puzzles my first time through, though.

Actually, I just took a peak at my original review of the game to see what I felt about its difficulty. At the time, I found a lot of the puzzles quite convoluted and overly complex. While I see the point I was trying to make, that doesn't seem to be as much of an issue this time around. Then again, that could be related to the fact that the team porting the game to the touch-screen-based systems had to find ways around having a mouse, and a lot of that is simply showing you what objects on the screen you can click on instead of having you pixel hunt around the screen for a while.


Game Mechanics:

An interesting side note is the fact that this time around, I found the recipe mixing aspect of Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy to be more enjoyable than my first visit several years ago. At the time, I found it to be just one more layer of complexity in the game, but this time around, it feels more like a necessary distraction.

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy - Part 2, and the previous half as well, will often have you picking up scraps of paper with ingredients on it. Putting these ingredients into a cooking pot will result in some needed result. The first couple of examples of this, both found in Part 1 include the need to create some makeup for your skin and the need to make some preserves to sweeten a deal you have to make. While these tasks are rarely complicated, they do break the standard point-and-click feel the rest of the game has.

What I'm not sure of though is if I feel different about this mechanic because the difficulty has changed a bit thanks to the U.I. considerations, or if the time between play-throughs has given me a different perspective. Either way, Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy is a fun enough adventure game that most fans of the genre should check out. I'm still wary of it's iPhone placement and feel that the PC or iPad versions might be a better choice, but if you got the first part on the iPhone, then you know what you are getting yourself into with this one. What ever you do though, don't play Part 2 before Part 1, since you really won't know what you are supposed to do.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

Related Links:



Microsoft Xbox 360 Fight Night: Champion Windows Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated