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By Keith B (29th Jan 2008)

I asked the powers that be at Hellbored if I could have a look at this, because I like the TV show. I mean I like CSI: Las Vegas, not CSI: New York where one of the team has such big hair that she must certainly cover crime scenes with her strands and become a suspect in every crime she goes to; and not CSI: Miami, where a ginger tool makes stupid statements while playing with his sunglasses.

No, I like CSI: Las Vegas and on that note alone I asked for this game. I knew that it was going to be tough for anyone to make a point and click game in the current decade (and using console controllers) without it being as painful as a mouthful of broken glass, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway.

I regret the move, because just about everything I hoped the game might have was missing. And, after a few hours of my life were taken away with clicking screens I wished the game disc itself were missing when I opened the box.

The game sees you as a new recruit, who remains nameless despite being in most conversations, posted to the Las Vegas Crime Lab. There are five crimes to solve and each of them sees you paired with one of the CSI team from the show, except, aside from sounding like the team (albeit on diazepam for the most part) they actually look nothing like them. Warwick looks somewhat like his real world counterpart but the others look like leftovers from a cut and paste party with figures from the 80s. The lip-synching is appalling and I’m actually shocked that they look so lifeless when the game has so little else to push its boundaries.

You see – the game is static. Entirely. When you get to a crime scene it is little more than a wide image, which can be zoomed in on to look for clues. The trees in the background don’t move and there is no traffic on the roads. So, as the DVD must surely have lots of room on it I would have thought that the developers would have put a lot more work in, especially on characters that actually move and talk.

The crimes for the most part are well thought out and realised. As you work through questioning the various ‘persons of interest’ the focus often switches between different suspects. The scriptwriting is actually well done and the crimes are interesting, making at least some of this game fun. But that’s where it ends.

Solving the crimes is little more than clicking the right place on the map at the right time. And clues stick out like neon lights in a dark swamp. Stopping short of actually glowing or flashing, the steps needed to move through the game are impossible to miss. When looking at the scene from the most panoramic mode, you can see which sections of the crime scene you can click on to move closer, and this means there will be a clue there. OK, some blood drops and fingerprints are a little more difficult to spot but the game makes even this piss easy by marking all your locations and all your items with a green tick to show you there is no more to glean from that particular item or area. So, one quick look at your PDA and you can see immediately where you’ll have to go because you haven’t exhausted all the collectable information. The game tries to liven up the actual collection of evidence by giving you two toolkits, one for finding evidence and the other for collecting. Only problem is that the game selects the right tool for the job automatically about 80% of the time, which makes giving you an option sort of redundant.

And if this wasn’t enough, at any point through any crime you can click on your helpful cardboard cut out, sorry, partner, for a hint. Despite the ominous warning that ‘it could count against your final score’ there isn’t actually any penalty for this. So, you could quite reasonably just hint your way through the entire game and still get your 1000 achievement points in a matter of a few hours.

Getting back to my fondness for the TV show. I like the crime lab, and the twiddling around with weird equipment and talking with the coroner about stuff. You get to do all this in the game and some of it almost borders on interesting but the rest just fades away into mediocrity. The list sounds exciting – searching databases and comparing fingerprints, DNA, blood samples, bullet types, tyre tracks; analysing sound and video evidence; assembling broken things on a table and examining them; and all manner of other exciting things you’d need three degrees and a PhD to be able to do in the real world. And while it does provide a nice distraction from the never ending pointing and clicking, it again suffers from being impossible to fail. Call up two items and try and say they’re a match, and the computer cardb…partner just says they’re not.

Questioning suspects is a matter of simply exhausting the questions, and there is nothing else required beyond that.

So, now that you know the game itself is sliding quickly into the pit of despair, I should tell you that the controls are woeful too. Yes, even doing the clicking is a pain in the ass.

Moving your icon around the screen is done with the left thumb-stick, but menu navigation sees you move to the D pad. Why? My icon is still on the screen, I can still move it, but no, I need to move to another input to simply click EXIT on a screen. Come on.

Even meeting Grissom is a complete anti-climax, with his repetitive speech and voice like he’s sucking Rohypnol for kicks.

This game is poor, all round. If you’re an achievement point whore you’ll get your rewards, but Jesus, it’s a painful way to go about your life.