Every time I hear about Slingo making an appearance in another game, I get a little excited. I keep hoping the magic formula will appear and turn a Slingo game into the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I’m continuously disappointed. On the surface, mixing slots and bingo is a magic combination for me! I love both so much. But for some reason, when you actually sit down and play the game, it gets rather boring rather quickly. So when I heard about Slingo Mystery, taking Slingo and throwing it into a hidden object game, I was geeked! I thought, finally, a version of Slingo I can get behind.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It’s not that Slingo Mystery is bad. In fact, it’s compelling enough that I wanted to get to the end. However, I was never thrilled and amazed with the game. The basic premise is that Freddie Gold has died and his ex-wife wants to get back her ring. However, the current wife (aka the widow) is a royal b**** who doesn’t want to give the ex a thing. The players are cast as the ex as she gets herself in and out of trouble in the empty casino, while going on a scavenger hunt set up by her dearly departed ex-husband. Along the way, she is guided by a friend helping her through the many areas of the casino. The story was cute, but always predictable. The voice acting was also pretty distracting, as it was stilted and it really detracted from the game. I think pure text would have been better than the voice acting.

The hidden object portion of the game is very weak. The aforementioned guide basically gives you 4-5 things at a time to find. The screen itself is pretty logical and using deductive reasoning will find things pretty quickly. For some reason, this just wasn’t fun. Each scene usually one of two objectives, find a way out or find the hidden Slingo machine. Once a Slingo machine was found and activated, several variations of Slingo had to be played. In order to get the next clue to the next machine, an objective had to be met, like scoring a certain number of points or making a certain number of slingo’s (lines). Having objectives to progress in the Slingo games themselves was actually pretty fun and I’d love to see an adventure game made purely of weird Slingo variations and objectives. That would end up pretty fun (I think).

So where does Slingo Mystery end up? Well, there’s no replayability, unless you want to play the different variations of Slingo purely for fun. There’s an option to make the game harder, but I didn’t see how that actually  made it harder. It plays more like an adventure title, but its too narrative and guided to actually succeed at that. The hidden object portion of the game is very weak and rather boring. The Slingo is fine, but there’s not enough of it in the story to make up for what it’s lacking in other areas. I just had such high hopes for this title and I was sorely disappointed that it was neither a good hidden object game or a good Slingo game. Maybe the next one…

Score: 5.4

Big Fish Games:
Shockwave: