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Get our game guide for: Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure. This precise WALKTHROUGH GAME STRATEGY GUIDE is now available for you right in your members area and compatable for the Nintendo Wii Platform. GameGuideDog.Com is dedicated to helping gamers through games. We are confident our support and guides are one of the best gaming resources anywhere!
Online Walkthrough located here:
http://www.wonderdogsoftware.com/GUIDES/SAFECRACKER.htm
A great port from the PC title, this puzzling game is now being released for the Nintendo Wii system Tuesday November 25th, 2008.
There are no surprises in Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure. The ode to high-stakes robbery from French developer Kheops Studio (Return to Mysterious Island, Voyage) stays true to its title with gameplay that has you breaking into safes of all different shapes and sizes. But any bonus points earned by the company for not trying to fool people with a more grandiose and less-accurate name are largely lost by the game itself, which is a set of mostly interesting brainteasers draped around a pointless plot.
You can't call this game an adventure. Although Safecracker has been constructed in the genre's standard modern style, with static camera views courtesy of QuickTime VR and clickable hot points, the total absence of any captivating narrative or characterization makes it feel like a collection of unrelated puzzles. For what it's worth, though, the story has you breaking into gimmicky safes in search of the last will and testament of the apparently recently deceased oil tycoon Duncan W. Adams. He was a bit of a kook and was into safe collecting, so the family assumes that the document was hidden away in one of the many elaborately locked safes scattered throughout his mansion. You're presumably some kind of kingpin burglar or locksmith (although it's hard to imagine what good a regular locksmith would be here; you'd be better off hiring somebody who's really good at Myst), so the family has turned to you in its hour of need.
Good B movies have been made based on even dumber plots, but Kheops doesn't do a lot with this premise. You aren't provided with much background on the goofy millionaire, the missing will, your motivations, or anything else. The mansion is beautifully realized (if lifeless, due to the static scenery) thanks to top-notch visuals that provide rooms with intriguing features like ornate fountains, miniature museums of African artifacts, leather furniture that looks so plush you want to skip the puzzles and sit down for a while, and music that evokes a whodunit atmosphere. But even though you're wandering through tastefully appointed settings, you're still in a big deserted house with the one-dimensional task of gathering clues and solving logic puzzles to pop open safes. One safe inevitably leads to another, so you end up following a rigid path of acquiring information (no more than a few safes are accessible at any given time) and useful items that eventually take you to the grand pooh-bah of safes, who is evidently holding the will.
Kheops livens things up by going beyond the usual hidden-behind-a-painting combination safe and into the sci-fi realm of safes secured by slider puzzles, magnetic blocks, lasers, and banks of colored lights reminiscent of Scotty's engineering panels on Star Trek. You do nothing but bang your head against one logic puzzle after another, most of which are tricky but solvable as long as you remain patient and open to taking the time to experiment with different solutions. Many are quite enjoyable, and provide a great "Hey, I did it!" sense of accomplishment. Seeing a green light come on or hearing a lock click open is always a satisfying moment.
Clues never walk you through the process of opening safes, either, so while you collect scraps of paper with numbers written on them, electronic gizmos, keys, and other useful items, in the end it's your brain that will be sorting through patterns and figuring out codes. Solutions always take more than a few minutes to suss out, and even after you realize what you're supposed to be doing, it sometimes requires more time to maneuver puzzle pieces into place.
But even fans of puzzle-heavy games might find Safecracker slow going, as the focus is always on opening safes and retrieving their contents. The puzzles themselves are different enough so that it feels like you're involved in various sorts of tasks (although there is a certain Rubik's Cube vibe to just about everything), and the challenge is reasonably high throughout. Still, since the end goal is always the same old acquisition of clues and goodies, you quickly begin to feel like you're on a treadmill, going from one room to the next and checking out one crazy safe after another. It would have helped if Kheops had tossed in the odd puzzle that was totally unrelated to safecracking, with all-new objectives. Making the safes more of a rare thing would have helped, too. Cracking even a laser-locked safe by playing a magnetic version of the kiddie board game Labyrinth can seem a bit ho hum, considering that you knock off one of these elaborately protected babies every half hour or so.
At its heart, Safecracker isn't a game so much as it is an assortment of logic puzzles as repetitive as those found in magazines, or in the paperback Sudoku collections cluttering newsstands these days. That approach will nicely do the trick for patient players who want to idle away their spare hours by solving such brainteasers, but those who want a more interesting adventure or more involved puzzles are best advised to look elsewhere.
CRITICS CORNER:
100Just Adventure
But there's a very specific pleasure also to be found in an adventure game in which the plot is simply a thin tissue that connects a series of delightfully attractive and fun puzzles.
100Four Fat Chicks
The measure of a puzzle game is not, of course, how pretty it looks or how convincing it sounds. The measure is how well it plays. I am happy to report that Safecracker 2006 plays beautifully. There are some familiar puzzles, some unfamiliar puzzles, and some very clever twists on the whole idea of what constitutes a puzzle.
83PC Gamer
Safecracker strips away all the narrative hoo-hah of traditional adventure games and tosses you into a labyrinth of mind-benders that range from simple sliding puzzles(requiring extreme patience)to code-breakers that throw you with unexpected twists. [Nov. 2006, p.120]
80Adventure Gamers
A must-have for puzzle fans and definitely worth a look for anyone who values an intellectual challenge.
80Quandary
A most enjoyable and satisfying puzzle game that you can work through in a couple of sittings or, if you prefer, take a puzzle or two at a time and make it last longer. I would recommend it for any puzzle game fan.
80AceGamez
Qualms about plots and frustrating moments aside however, Safecracker has undoubtedly achieved what it set out to do. For people who either don't like or can't play fast action games, Safecracker offers a challenge that will tax the brains of even the most dedicated puzzlers. If you enjoy puzzles and have a keen mind and plenty of patience, this is one game I can thoroughly recommend you crack open.
75Jolt Online Gaming UK
If you or your family like your games with a healthy dose of mental gymnastics then Safecracker is a pretty good bet, and isn't too bad value for the money.
75Worth Playing
Safecracker fills the role it's designed for like a key fits its keyhole.
75Game Chronicles
The sheer simplicity in Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure is its greatest asset; easy to maneuver around and gets right into the logic puzzles that are the mainstay of the game.
70GameZone
Players will feel a real sense of accomplishment upon completing each one. However, there isn't anything else to do in this game, and once the puzzles are solved, there is no going back and replaying.
69IGN
It's a good thing Safecracker has a number of entertaining puzzles, because it has little else.
65GameSpot
As long as you're not too hung up on variety and plot, these breaking-and-entering brainteasers will delight puzzle fans.
58Strategy Informer
So that's basically it. If you enjoy your puzzle games and like to work your brain on challenges ranging from simple to break-the-desk frustrating, then Safecracker might just be for you.
50EuroGamer
Apart from the odd frustrating puzzle, there's nothing much at fault here, aside from the fact that what you're buying is a small collection of puzzles and nothing more. As long as you realise that's all Safecracker is - and there's no adventure element to speak of - then you won't be disappointed.
38PC Gamer UK
An agonisingly unimaginative adventure game acting as a gateway to a puzzle game based purely on cracking safes. [Aug 2007, p.92]
31PC Zone UK
Safe and very sorry. [July 2007, p.77]
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