The Hunt for Red Panda (iOS) Review

Ever wanted to play a video game while going to the museum? Now that wish can become reality with The Hunt for Red Panda, which is a hidden object game in which the stages are famous pieces of art, and the "hidden objects" is the damage done on the paintings by the infamous Red Panda. To pass the stages these damages do not only have to be found, but also fixed by the use of various tools. This twist to the genre could have been handled far better than this, though.

There was a great opportunity to make each kind of obstacle feel unique and creating some fun gameplay, however most of the tools feels exactly the same save for the one used to identify the damages and the fly swatter. What this title does differently though is having several game modes and mini-games which are used to earn more clues to help find some of the smaller objects faster. These are fun side-tracks in what would otherwise run a huge risk of getting extremely monotonous. While the mini-games are working, though, the same can't be said about all game modes.

The biggest issue here are those stages which involve swatting flies as part of the victory condition. The problem is that these aren't saved as part of the progress when the stage is finished, which leads to that some stages become unwinnable and ultimately have to be redone if enough errors are fixed before the time runs out, as players are simply given too little time to fix some stages and swatting the flies after some point making this a feature that feels like a bad punishment.

This could easily have been solved if the developer just reset those stages fully if the player failed to complete the stage in time. It is such a shame as, beside this pretty severe problem, The Hunt for Red Panda is a fun title. There are only so many time players can stand having to finish a stage without progressing before they will quit the game though, and that limit will sadly be reached pretty soon.