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While the UK has an attraction known as the Lake District, America takes its version of the attraction several steps further with its Great Lakes offering.  Boom Zap has targeted this particular area of the American continent for this next title in its Finding America series and the subject of this review.

Available in Collector's Edition format, this product comes with a choice of difficulty levels.  You can select from Easy, Medium, Hard or Custom settings varying the Hint charging time periods between 15 and 45 seconds while a Super Hint recharge will take between 30 and 60 seconds.  There are also adjustable options for audio levels and screen resolution. 

The game offers three different play modes entitled Campaign, Subgame Journal and Play unlimited but only one mode is readily available when the game starts.  While Campaign mode can be accessed immediately, you will need to work through some of the Campaign modes 38 chapters before parts of the other two modes become unlocked and accessible.

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Each Campaign chapter will contain up to four locations where you will need to carry out Hidden Object style tasks.  There will also be a mini game that may not have any obvious connection to the assigned locations.  While you do have freedom of choice in deciding which order to tackle the Hidden Object scenes, you will need to complete all of them before the mini game becomes available.

Each Hidden Object location will consist of the actual scene overlaid with a panel featuring the required items plus three tools made up of a Hint, Super Hint and Magnifier.  The presentation format of the required items will be in fixed format.  It could be standard text, jumbled words, riddles, missing vowels or other letters removed.  Other methods used could involve silhouettes, images or items that are paired.  When standard text is used to display the list, some of the entries will be coloured blue to indicate that a task will need to be performed for its selection. 

As well as the listed required items, each location will contain a Collectible in the form of a Star plus five keys that will appear singularly with each visit.  While finding the Star will unlock the location for its appearance in the Play Unlimited mode, each key found during a visit will reveal a fact regarding the location.  To gather all the facts you can either visit a scene multiple times or wait until it make another appearance in a later chapter.

Located in each chapter will be a mini game puzzles.  By tackling this puzzles as part of the chapter's challenge, you will be granted access to it with the Subgame Journal mode of play.  Varied in its type, these mini game puzzles feature tasks such as Click to Cycle, Swap/Flip, Finding Pairs, Spot the Difference and a Slider puzzles.

As part of its Collector's Edition format, this title comes with extra chapters and puzzles that can be accessed once the main game is completed.  You can also access the Play Unlimited game mode where you can find all the hidden items concealed within each scene plus check out the revealed facts listed in a Fun Facts Diary option.  Among these titbits are facts such as that Kalamazoo is the home to the annual "Do-Dah" parade where participants wear creative costumes and that the WinneWissa Falls in Minnesota is often referred to as "The Little Niagara of the West".

To learn  more above the Great Lakes, you can download this game from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $19.99 or from Big Fish Games priced at £15.73.  The game requires a 2.0 GHz processor with 4096MB of RAM and 1.44GB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later.

Finding America - The Great Lakes Collector's Edition | Big Fish Games

Finding America - The Great Lakes Collector's Edition | GameHouse