Organization: Boom Zap

Awakening is one of Big Fish Games' most popular series, and this month the publisher brings us what it hopes will be the next evolutionary step in the hidden object genre: namely a free-to-play hidden object/building sim hybrid called Awakening Kingdoms. While it skillfully combines many of the most prevalent casual game types—hidden object hunts, jigsaw puzzles, building simulations and collectibles—it also fails to overcome the repetitiousness seemingly inherent to the social game milieu.Kingdoms starts well by casting you as the steward of Queen Sophia's ill-fated Skyward Kingdom. Having clashed with and vanquished the evil mage Dreadmyre, the queen asks you to help her people recover and rebuild her war-torn lands. After choosing a name and an avatar, you get to work by becoming acquainted with the kingdom's various human and non-human inhabitants, and then Harry Potter-like, take on an owl assistant named Linea. Gamers familiar with the Awakening universe will feel immediately at home with the game's fantasy characters and landscapes, and social gamers will take its energy-based hidden object searches as a matter of course. Fortunately, in addition to these familiar things, there are a few new elements on offer to pique the interest of less-casual, casual gamers."Then again, Kingdoms'features aren't really new; it's the way they're presented that freshens them up. Since your job is to rebuild the kingdom, a good amount of your time is spent constructing and upgrading the queen's castle and environs. This is more satisfying than in most "ville"-type games because you're given a closer view of things as they improve. It's also better because you have to do something more engaging than clicking and waiting to gain money and resources. Both of these come from exploring various hidden object scenes; alas, this hidden-object-dependency is unfortunate because the process is so repetitive.