I really enjoyed the aesthetic for Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures. While I am familiar with the Antiques Roadshow program, I am not an avid watcher, but I do love a good hidden object game. So when Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures became available for review, I decided to check it out and was quite pleased. Since I am not familiar with the specific appraisers that regularly appear on the show, I can't accurately compare their videogame counterparts, but everyone looked good and the main characters were believable people.

All of the levels are well done and filled with interesting details specific to their location. Since your travels will take you literally from one end of the U.S. to the other, I enjoyed seeing things like the gator heads and old fashioned signs strewn about the Cajun houseboat, the military artifacts at the old fort, the trapper gear in a hidden cave and the Old West paraphernalia at the saloon. Each location has its individual soundtrack and each one truly fits the scene well and makes you feel as though you have stepped back in time to that locale. Naturally, the Antiques Roadshow theme song will play, as well as a short video snippet of the show's intro, when you bring an item to be appraised. It's a nice touch and really puts the Antiques Roadshow wax seal on things.

The storyline in Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures goes like this. You play as Julie, a young history teacher with a knack for finding great antiques. She goes to work at an antiques store run by Mr. Charlie Hinton who wants her to solve a mystery with only an old decoder and a torn off piece of a photo of a music box, both family heirlooms, to guide her on her journey. Her quest starts at a Pennsylvania farmhouse which supposedly contains the music box from the photo. For each level, Hinton gives Julia a list of items to obtain, along with a primary item that she needs to fetch, whose picture will appear in the upper right corner. As she progresses, she may come across companion items which, if obtained, will help increase the value of the primary item.

In Timed Mode, you will see a clock in the top left corner and if you find all of the items before the clock runs out, you'll get additional money, along with unlocking achievements as you go. There is also a Casual Mode which doesn't have the timed parameter. If you get stumped in finding an item, you can press the Hint button and you'll get some aid. It can be in the form of a butterfly which flutters around the screen, landing on an item in your list, or it could be a hint that blacks out the screen and leaves a little spotlight to land on an item. There's also a small green radar screen that you swipe across the area and when it comes across one of your items, the item glows in the screen. You might even get a compass that you must guide around the screen, looking for an item. Sometimes, the Hint simply tells you to use an item in your inventory, since some things that you pick up go into the Items section instead of just disappearing from the list and these will be used to pry boards away from a hidden compartment, search in dark places, obtain out of reach items, break locks keeping you out, and so on. If you prefer pure hidden object, with no adventure aspects, this may not be the game for you. That being said, I normally fit that category, but I really enjoyed having to use my brain in a different way instead of just looking for hidden objects and I found the adventure aspects lots of fun, once I got used to them.

Once you find the primary item and hopefully the companion object(s), you may need to do some quick repairs before traveling to a location of the Antiques Roadshow and presenting your item. These come in the form of timed mini-games and include one where you tap cracks in an item to fill them with composite, one where you must buff the item clean, a slide puzzle where you reconstruct a certificate of authenticity, and one where you must locate small items such as several buttons or gears amidst a pile of hundreds of other different colored, but like items. These mini-games were a nice change of pace from the already fun hidden object scenes.

When you do get to the show and present your prized item, you'll get the background and value of it from one of the show's appraisers. I did a little research on specific items and they don't appear to be real items, but it's still fun listening to the "history." When you return to the shop to discuss your findings with Mr. Hinton, you'll notice that his once-empty shop has begun to fill with the items you have procured. You can later click on them and see their names and values. In between levels, you'll use the decoder and another piece of the photo to get pieces of a message that solves the mystery. While you don't actually do anything other than watch the message get filled in, it's a nice way to tie everything together and I enjoyed the storyline and eventual reveal.

The difficulty in Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures is just right. The items can be difficult to spot, but they are never hidden in ridiculous, super-tricky or unfair ways. You may have to cut away some brush to discover a hidden cave or even solve a puzzle to find a hidden crypt, but it all works well with the main mystery of the story. Even if you run out of time in a hidden object screen on the Timed Mode, there doesn't seem to be a huge penalty, other than you not getting quite as much money. The game will also offer you the opportunity to travel to present the primary object, regardless of whether you have found the companion objects, but I recommended getting them all because it makes the story more fun. If you really don't want any stress, you can always play the game in Untimed Mode and just enjoy the ride. You will get the same story.

What was problematic, and therefore made the game a little more difficult, was the fact that sometimes I would tap on an item and it wouldn't register. Typically, I found that I had to use pinch-to-zoom and when I did, I could get a better bead on the object, especially if it was tiny.

Another minor annoyance would be when I would spot things in the scene that looked important, but weren't clickable. Then later, after discovering the primary object, these same objects would then be clickable as companion objects. I wish they had been clickable from the start since they were clearly important in appearance.

Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures really makes use of the iPad's touch screen and it seems ideally suited for this type of game. You'll tap your finger on items to pick them up, sweep your finger vigorously across items to buff them clean, gently tap your finger to fill cracks in items and tap your finger on the picture slide to move frames from one spot to another to complete the picture. You can use the pinch-to-zoom feature to hone in on a spot and see things more clearly, although once you use a Hint, the picture will automatically zoom back out. In fact, since your Hints take 60 seconds to refill, sometimes your zoomed out picture will remain static and unable to be moved about or zoomed in on until the Hint timer runs out, especially if you have located the item the Hint was helping you with. Once the Hint timer ends, you can then zoom back in and continue your search.

There's a fun storyline behind Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures and lots of great gameplay. While you will revisit locations several times (which actually works to your benefit when you have already spotted some of the items that you may not have been required to pick up on your last trip), they never feel cheap because of this. Instead, I liked the revisits since I was already familiar with the locations. Besides, your travels will take you to so many locations across the country that you have plenty of exposure to different slices of ancient America. If you like hidden object and don't mind a bit of adventuring, I highly recommend you check out Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America's Hidden Treasures. Although the main mystery gets solved and wraps up quite nicely, the plot even alludes to an upcoming trip to England to further explore details of the mystery. Here's hoping that there will be an add-on pack with more mystery and scenes or even a sequel!