Item - Planet Hunters

Planet Hunters feels like it should work, what with three very cleverly drawn villains, and them having neat secret codes for their language, and so forth. But it does feel a bit paint by numbers, and perhaps they're a bit too cartoonishly evil. But they have cool names: Sarvala, Venya and Gradak. And they look the part, too. They've escaped from The Outlaw sector and are gallivanting around space blasting planets with an ominous looking weapon called the Nethergun that can wipe out whole planets. This seems like something that a whole army of spies need to stop (or at least a team of three, what with there being three villains) and not just you, as you sneak aboard and infiltrate things slowly. (Somehow, the three of them don't have a simple panic button to alert their cohorts when there's unexpected trouble.)

The illustrations and deaths are the high point of the book. Gradak has little spores above his head and then there's Venya with her little high-tech slingshot, and Sarvala controls the Nethergun and feels like an evil version of Callisto. You wind up as a mushroom if you shoot at Gradak and miss, and Venya's plants climb up a tree to strangle you to death at her orders. However, the references to their huge weakness, based on what sort of life forms they are left me all "okay, I get it" about halfway through, and the book kept pouring it on. It comes up as you first capture them on their ship, then chase them on the planet you all eject to (though getting them to squabble so the ship crashes is makes for one of the funniest picture/passage combos in the series!)

It's engaging, but there's a "here we go again" feel to it, with a lot of the puzzles feeling forced enough even to my young self. No, Sarvala wasn't going to shoot you with the Nethergun, as that would destroy the planet you were on. And Gradak sure wasted his sweet time taking time to building a huge structure just to have it collapse on you--but for some reason he lets you choose which rope to pull, so the structure doesn't collapse completely. And even when I was young, I cringed at the "You had a one in a million chance and you made it, Spy!" text after one choice. Even though it was indeed a one-in-a-million change after your lucky escape from an asteroid belt to get back to a moving spaceship, it read like really unnecessary flattery. Which slightly ruined how BaIS's puzzles usually made me feel like there were more possibilities than just the number of pages to visit.

So this one does feel less than the sum of its parts, which is a pity, since any of Sarvala, Gradak and Venya would be fun to chase through a whole book. But tackling three of them in just 120 pages left things feeling rushed and jumbled.

More reviews by andrewschultz

The attempt to craft slightly more interesting villains falls a little flat. The villains' oh-my-god hidden weakness is made so obvious that anyone over six can figure it out quite easily, which reduces the impact of the climax significantly.

More reviews by Aussiesmurf

This is a fairly uninteresting entry in the series. None of the puzzles are particularly inspired and the plot couldn't be much more linear.

More reviews by Demian

I really enjoyed the three different bad guys and the different rooms they were staying in. It reminded me of the different environments found in book #6. The almighty "solution" to your problems is kind of a classic sci-fi thing, so I like that. I noted that the solution to the puzzle on page 57 in the book was simply wrong. I actually cut out and made the figure in question with paper to demonstrate that the supposedly wrong answer is right.

More reviews by Dtar