The search takes her to several locations in Malibu, designed to match locations in the television series —home, school, the beach, the concert stadium and (of course) the mall. Her best friend Lilly is her constant companion, but you only see Lilly when she steps out to give Hannah advice or to do a little racing. A convenient ingame map helps you get between locations with a simple jump, unless time is short and you have to climb aboard one of Lilly’s wheels (skateboard, roller blades or scooter) to get there quickly.

In general, the game follows the pattern of (A) Miley needs a piece of information from someone. (B) This person can give her that information, but needs help first. (C) Miley runs the errand or finds the object that the person needs. (D) Miley reports back the the person, who tells her the next person she needs to talk to. And so we’ve returned to (A), with a new person. Lilly is along to help remind you what your next step is, and to deliver her half of the dialogue that helps make the series popular.

There are actually three mysteries in the game, roughly equivalent to a short episode each. Each mystery has the same starting point (someone is threatening to reveal Miley’s dual identities), but the designers do a good job making all three solutions different from each other.

In fact, pretty much the entire game is touchscreen-driven. You use it to select your destination on the map, to move (touch where you want to go), to open doors (trace a pattern on the screen), to control your inventory, and to clear obstacles from Lilly’s path. The A and B buttons are used to continue conversations and occasionally to confirm a choice. We don’t recall using the D-pad at all.

Conversations are accompanied by a cartoon-drawn head of whoever’s speaking; it seems odd that the game doesn’t use actual images from the series, rather than cartoons. We would much rather have seen the people we know from the series rather than these cartoons.

The game feels unpolished in other ways too. For a few examples:

* Lilly’s dashes are timed, even though there’s little you can do to help her go any faster. Hitting an obstacle costs a few seconds, but you still won’t take too long unless you hit three obstacles, in which case you’ve lost and have to start the mini-game over again anyway. Why bother timing them? For that matter, you eventually unlock the skateboard, roller blades and scooter. However, except for the topdown graphic, they look, act and perform exactly the same. Why bother creating three different images?

* When speaking characters don’t currently have anything to say, they recite from a list of generic phrases. Unfortunately, that means (for instance) that the beauty shop attendant will suggest you go to the beauty shop while standing in the shop herself. Since the shop isn’t actually named (shops are identified with a small icon and the general paraphernalia that you might expect), responses like that can lead to confusion as you try to decide if you’re really where you think you are.

* Any time you’re lost, Lilly can remind you what you need to be doing. Unfortunately, she usually just tells you who you need to see, not where. It’s sometimes difficult to remember where you’re supposed to find someone, especially after a break. Would it have been too difficult to include the information that Amy is in the clothes store, or Jenny is at the beauty shop?

* Clicking on a non-responding character triggers a brief beep. But clicking on one character triggered the beep, not because he wasn’t the right person but because (as far as we can tell) he’s too far away. He’s too far away because his sales counter is wide, so the only way to talk to him is to walk behind the counter. It took awhile to figure that one out.

* At one point, you promise Oliver a pair of show tickets. The next time you see him, the only way to get past him is to give him the tickets you’ve promised. Jesse and Dad each spent over half an hour looking for the tickets (at the stadium offices? at home? where else?) before one of us realized that we simply had to choose the option “here are your tickets” even though we didn’t have them. Turns out we did have them; you just never pick them up and they don’t appear in your inventory.

* The extras include a video and eighteen character profiles. The video is simply a tutorial for the game. If you’ve gotten that far, you don’t need it and it isn’t interesting. And in this, the very first Hannah Montana game, the profiles are of … an assortment of mall clerks, students, and school staff.

The only extra that is at all interesting is Miley’s clothes closet, which is actually an extensive room in its own right. That’s where you try out the various clothing (a dozen each blouses and bottoms, patterns, appliques, glasses, hats and shoes) that you’ve found throughout the adventure. And if you haven’t found all 72 items during the adventures themselves, you can go back out to track down the others once the main game is over. (Dad collected 71; we’re still not sure where the last pair of glasses is hiding.)

You can try on each item; you can color and pattern each blouse and bottom, and add an applique to each blouse, and you can combine them into outfits that you save and even share with your friends via wireless transfer. Unfortunately, there’s still a lack-of-polish feeling here. Miley’s cartoon figure is so exaggerated that it’s hard to recognize an applique or pattern (or even the style of a blouse) past her Barbie-esque curves.

One big plus for Hannah Montana — three save game slots! We’re tired of playing games that only one of us can be playing at a time; with three slots, there were enough to go around the family. Jesse liked that even though Miley has the same objective each time (find who is threatening to reveal her secret), the reasons why and the people who do it are very different. Overall, he liked the game, especially that it didn’t take days to complete it. Dad was less impressed — the gameplay wasn’t all that interesting and felt pretty repetitive.

Additional Note from Dad. If you’ll check out our review of Disney’s Cheetah Girls, I gave it high marks for sending all sorts of positive messages. Not so with Hannah Montana; in fact, just the opposite.

The standard method for Miley and Lilly to get past Ashley and Amber is by out-insulting them. In fact, deliver a sufficiently withering insult, and Miley gets something to add to her wardrobe closet. At one point, your insults include calling a black girl a chimp. I’m not sure what world the BVG designers are living in, but in my world, that’s at the least tone-deaf, if not worse. (That’s along with calling them elephants and commenting on their body odor.) There’s a television episode in which Miley and Lilly stooped to the level of Ashley and Amber, trading insults, and that’s almost certainly the inspiration for this aspect of the game. However, by the end of the episode, it becomes clear that Miley and Lilly have made a poor choice. Not so in this game; insults are rewarded, not penalized.

In a few cases, when you’ve out-insulted Ashley and Amber, they storm off, dropping something. You pick it up, consider returning it to them, then decide not to with a happy, “Finder’s Keepers!” basically adding stealing to your repertoire for the game. Yes, there are plenty of games where you’ve got to grab everything you find that isn’t nailed down, but to make it explicit that the girls have a chance to return the item and don’t … that’s not right.

Add to that a couple of times that Miley and her brother agree not to tell their dad about the other cutting school. On the television series, Miley is hardly a model of rectitude, but by the end of the episode, things get sorted out and the kids learn a useful lesson or two. Not so with the game version. All these things cnosidered, the bottom line for me is a game that I hesitate to recommend to anyone.