Hide N Find on iOS: Creating our own hidden object scenes isn't as fun as it could have been

Earlier this month, we brought you a preview of Hide N Find, 6waves' multiplayer hidden object game that allows you to turn your own images into hidden object scenes for your friends to play. Now that we've had a chance to go hands-on with this photographic puzzle game, we've found that it unfortunately works against itself almost every step of the way.

The first and biggest problem with Hide N Find is its requirement to login with Facebook. This allows you to play games against your Facebook friends, but it also locks you into that with no freedom outside of your friends list. Each round allows you to pull in a picture from your phone's albums or take a picture on the fly, and you'll then get to create highlights around three items on the screen to create "tap" spots for your friends.

You're required to type in the name of each item you highlight, thereby creating a "hidden object" in the scene. Say you take a picture of a bowl of fruit. You could then draw a highlight around a strawberry and label it appropriately. On your friend's turn, they would be given the same picture of fruit, along with the text words of the necessary objects. A simple tap on the strawberry in our example would earn your friend points. The more complex the picture, the harder scenes can be to complete and vice versa. It's a great little gameplay setup for people that love photography and have interesting pictures to share.

While Hide N Find has a great premise, the game really suffers from the inability to play with strangers. This limitation makes sense to a point, as you're using your own personal pictures as hidden object scenes, and these pictures may contain faces or other personal items, but without random play with strangers, you're extremely limited to how you can actually play the game. That is, many gamers may not have many Facebook friends with iPhones, and even fewer that actually wish to play the game with them. Why not allow access to a pool of stock photos so that gamers can play with strangers?

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Not only would this allow the game to be played much more often and by many more players, but it would also keep the game feeling fresh as we're not limited to just using a few pictures that we might have stored on our phones at any one point in time. On top of this, the game suffers from a lot of server errors, slow loading times and app crashes.

As it stands, Hide N Find suffers from its own design. It has a great basic setup, but it needs to allow for more player freedom before it can really be a stellar experience. If you have enough friends in your own personal network to give this game a go, it can now be downloaded for free on iTunes.

Download Hide N Find on iOS >

Have you tried Hide N Find? Do you have a large network of friends with iPhones to play this game with? Sound off in the comments!