The Search for Fran 2 is a game. Sort of. It is rather difficult to explain what kind of a thing this is, but this review will be a spirited attempt to convey what exactly this thing is doing with its own Steam page. The game was developed by Archor Wright, and it is probably worth immediately noting, that this person releases roughly one of these “games” a month on Steam. The fastest and easiest way to explain this game would be to simply say: The Search for Fran 2 is an asset flip.

For those unfamiliar with this term, an “asset flip” is where a developer buys pre-made art assets and plonks them into a world with little to no design or care. Then, you, the player, get to run around a world filled with assets that may look good because they were made by competent 3D modelers, but the game they’ve been used in is one that generally has no actual gameplay or overall purpose. That is what The Search for Fran 2 is too!
 

It would be easiest to simply explain the game by describing and discussing how it starts. You are a person who has a weird walking animation, and you are dropped in the middle of this relatively well-designed city, although we’ll see why it’s well-designed soon, and you are greeted by a billboard that tells you how to play. It informs you that you can do quests, collect glorbs and drive cars. You may note a lack of specificity there.

You are then set free to do what you want! This means that you can walk and run around, as there is no jump functionality and no combat, and get “quests” from random people who can be hard to find, as there is no map at all. These quests also entail just walking somewhere. There is no actual gameplay, as stated, so the “quests” don’t really result in you doing anything.
 

But hey, there are cars to drive! They’re well-modeled and well-textured, but we know why that’s the case, and you can drive then. You can drive! The Search for Fran 2 is a game with cars. That is all there is to say about the cars. You can drive around aimlessly and do nothing. There are no objectives tied to them, and, furthermore, the many randomly parked cars you find in the game, which look the same as the regular ones, cannot be driven as they are merely static props.

But wait, there’s more! You can collect glorbs! What are glorbs? They’re orbs. You may be wondering why they’re called glorbs then. Who knows! But you can collect 69 of these glorbs. Get it? It’s that funny number. Sixty-nine. Ha ha. It’s that naughty number. This game was designed by the greatest of all comedians to ever grace the face of our glorious green world. 

Anyway, The Search for Fran 2 is a game filled with pointless stuff. There’s a fully realized city that lives around you, but you use that world to do nothing. Although, if you just want to zoom around the city and check it out for some reason, you can disconnect from your character and become a disembodied camera flying around the world. It’s certainly a faster way to travel. It also helps with finding the “quests” that amount to nothing. But you’ll mostly just be floating around and wondering why you’re not playing something that actually has gameplay.
 

Here’s where we need to discuss the technical issues, though. The game may have very little going for it, but The Search for Fran 2 is a buggy mess. It takes ages to load into the game, which is weird for a game that has nothing in it. The animations are poor, the frame rate constantly drops, and if your drivers are not updated, then the walls themselves may become invisible. And to be honest, this is just rather funny; if you decide to push “escape” on your keyboard, the game doesn’t go to a menu; it just quits the game. You have to hit “o” to enter the menu because why not?!

The Search for Fran 2 is not a game. It is not optimized in the slightest; it has no gameplay other than pointless busy work, it has cars but no reason to use them, a walk/run function but nowhere worth running to, and a disembodied camera mode that adds nothing. Here’s where it’s time to pull the wool from over the eyes because there’s a reason the world is well-designed and looks pretty good, and that’s because the game is the Unreal Engine 5 Matrix tech demo.
 

It’s someone else’s tech demo that has had all the interesting stuff removed, but they did leave bullet time functionality in! Why is there bullet-time functionality in a game with no bullets? Um… that’s a good question! In conclusion, The Search for Fran 2 is undoubtedly a thing that exists, but there are many games out there that people have spent their time and dedication building. You should not waste your money or time on an asset flip when there is so much talent out there waiting to be found. 
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed