GameZone:
I've been playing Nancy Drew games for years, and have been glad for them, as they are excellent games for young teens to play, especially girls. Nancy Drew is a good role model. She is smart, and a good friend.
As with any series that has been around this long, the games run the gamut from the great to the not so great, and several in between. The last game, The Haunting of Castle Malloy, was a very good game with lots of challenging puzzles. The Ransom of the Seven Ships appears to be an interesting game, as it is set on a beautiful tropical island that is isolated and difficult to reach.
Nancy Drew: The Ransom of the Seven Ships is a quality adventure game that will appeal to longtime fans as well as newcomers. However, ACG hopes that future stories will involve more meaningful interactions with the characters that Nancy meets. George's role is this game is quite limited, and she spends so much time hopelessly working on a phone alone rather than helping Nancy. Likewise, Bess does not interact with Nancy or George at all for better part of the game; the player does not meet her until the very end, so only Nancy Drew fans who are familiar with the books will know anything about her.
On the other hand, the monkeys in the game are lively and cute, and there are plenty of fun puzzles for the player to solve. They recommend this game for every adventure game fan, though I also recommend newcomers to try out one of the other titles in the series first.
Overall this game will be good for newcomers due to the large number of standalone obstacles. Long time series fans may not be so enamoured of these, and certainly a number are just thinly disguised make-work projects that people can all live without, but there's enough of interest here for everyone. Combined, they contribute to making Ransom of the Seven Ships one of the longer Nancy Drew games, taking about 18 hours to finish the game in Senior Detective mode. But hey, no one ever said that finding buried treasure would be a vacation, even for Nancy Drew.
GameZone writes: "This is the 20th game in the long-running series, hard to believe! I remember the first Nancy Drew game, and how it was wonderful that a company was looking at the preteen and teen female market with a game that wasn't about makeup or horoscopes. Ransom of the Seven Ships belongs with the best of the series, and is definitely a must-have for any fan of the series".
