It becomes a little difficult to tell what demographic the game targets - the simplicity of the challenges suggests a young audience, but the content seems more "young adult". The clunky back and forth that passes as witty repartee is of a notably adult tone, though not a very clever one. While clearly aimed at a younger audience in terms of the rather low difficulty, the dialogue and instructions don't really lend themselves to a children's game. The issue of the dialogue being age-inappropriate really permeates the whole game. This is a sensible choice, in that point-and-click has always been the style of the Carmen Sandiego games, but given how little goes on in the game, some use of the other controls might have livened up the experience. The use of the DS's external hardware is otherwise unremarkable, continuing the obligatory use of the second screen, which feels forced, while the buttons have no role in the actual gameplay, leaving the stylus to do all the work.
Unfortunately, you only do this once, and none of the subsequent investigations include anything that has the same degree of simple fun. The notable exception is the fingerprint collection mini-game, which involves using the stylus as a brush to spread dust on a surface then blowing the dust off, by blowing into the microphone. This ranges from trying to work out which book on a shelf is the correct one to tapping every item in a lab in a desperate attempt to determine which ones have been arbitrarily set as usable. This is compounded by the puzzles being uninteresting, mostly consisting of stabbing the stylus at every object on the screen until you access them in the order the game wants you to.
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There aren’t all that many puzzles in the game and the only challenging ones are those that require trial and error because you aren’t given enough information. We might have been a little less concerned about this if the core game wasn't so weak. In fact, there's almost no reason to read any of the tiny amounts of text describing where you're headed. In previous Carmen Sandiego games, the integration of the information about the places and people you meet in the game with the puzzles was a fairly important part of the gameplay, but here it just feels tacked on, more like an afterthought than a genuine attempt to include an educational aspect. Everything looks exactly as you'd expect in a puzzle game for kids - which makes the more "adult" dialogue stand out even more. Characters stand out from pretty backgrounds in what is essentially the exact same visual style of the original games, as well as the cartoons some readers may fondly remember.
Everything looks nice enough, presented in classic Carmen Sandiego style, with good delineation between background and foreground objects. The graphics are clean and clear, but they lack flair.
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