Don't Expect to be Challenged
Written: Feb 25 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fun to go around and find items
Cons: Nothing interesting to do with what you find
The Bottom Line: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is basically a point and click game that is being dragged out with endless Q&A and moving about between locations.
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| Petra's Full Review: CSI for Windows |
Yes, I'm a CSI addict, although I'm not much of a fan of the spinoffs. I watch the original CSI religiously, I can deal with CSI New York because of Gary Sinise (but even he can't make up for the rest of the boring cast much longer) and CSI Miami ... well, let's say it's okay if David Caruso doesn't make your skin crawl which, in my case, he does.
Now, I also like computer games that don't have any shoot 'em up scenarios but rather require a lot of searching, mapping territory and figuring out how to put things together to get ahead, such as Roger Wilko, Space Janitor, Lands of Lore or even some of the Star Trek games that didn't include space battle.
That said, one would think that the CSI game would be a dream come true; unfortunately, it is the sort of nightmare I encountered only once before with the game Ringworld.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation presents the player with five crime scenarios to solve. One very annoying drawback about these games is that one can not go back within a game. One can save the game and pick up again where left off, but once it is played out, even if some clues have not been found, one can not go back into the finished game but has to start completely over.
You also can not leave a game saved and head on to the next case if you are stumped. You have to completely finish out one case before going to the next.
The five cases themselves are not particularly challenging; mostly, because there is little more required of the player than to sweep your cursor across the screen until it changes color, that's where you'll find a clue. Then you hold any one of the provided evidence detection/collection tools until something works. You then take the evidence to the lab, hand it to the lab guy, who will give you some info or check it out on a microscope or computer.
When your character encounters a person at a crime scene, you are either given a number of questions which you click on, get your answer and move on, or they tell you they have nothing more to say. Again, you can not go back and ask a question over if you forget what someone said, but really, it doesn't matter if you listen to it or not. The game is basically a point and click until you clicked everything there is, then the case solves itself in the interrogation room where your criminal confesses in the end.
There is no real "investigation" on the player's part. This game is about as exciting as a Rubik's Cube once you've been given the instructions to solve it. All you do is work through the motions and eventually you're done.
The graphics of the game are pretty average. Squarish-looking characters whose arms sway constantly, even if they're not active. The first character the player (who plays a rookie investigator assigned to the crime lab) encounters is Gil Grissom at his desk, sending the player off to his first case.
For the five cases, the player is teamed up with one of the CSI characters for each game: Gil Grissom, Nick Stokes, Warrick Brown, Sara Sidle and Kathryn Willows. None of the characters resembles the characters very well. They sound like the characters, mostly because of the intonation and style put into it by the actors who did the voices for this game.
There are 3 basic locations, the morgue, Captain Grissom's office and the lab. In the morgue, Dr. Robbins gives information on the cause of death of a victim, just like on the show. Captain Grissom gives legal information, looks up suspects' info or calls in suspects to interrogate. In the lab, Greg Sanders will give info on evidence collected.
Occasionally, the monotony is interrupted with short videos, recreating a crime scenario as the investigators see it could have happened. If you've seen the show, you've seen the so-called "flesh shots", showing details of the inside of a body, bones snapping and breaking, flesh being torn, a person being strangled, etc. These shots are the only thing giving this game a Mature rating, some being extremely graphic.
At the end of each game, you receive an evaluation of your performance. Each time you ask for help from a character, points are deducted; any evidence you missed, even if it was not needed to solve the case, also deducts points. Depending on how many of the recreation videos you found during the game is the number of bonus material you get.
Unfortunately, the bonus material is nothing more than still drawings of the characters or scenes from the game which don't even look anything like the actual characters you are playing with.
If you want to see all the bonus material, you have to go back and replay the games from the start since, as mentioned, you can't go back into a game. That means you would have to spend another half hour redoing everything you've already done before you can even start looking for what you've missed.
All in all, I spent about one night on the game to have it completely done from start to finish, and most of that time was spent surfing the screen with the cursor or going from one place to the other to let the game run its course pretty much by itself.
Installing the game took about 10 minutes at maximum installation on my laptop. The game still did not run without the CD Rom inserted. As a matter of fact, it got my laptop hopelessly stuck with a CSI game screen and an error message, requiring me to restart an endless number of times until I could finally run the game from the disk after all.
When trying to uninstall I learned that there is no simple uninstall icon. By sheer coincidence, I found the way to uninstall when I hit the setup again to see if maybe an icon would be offered. Instead, the game started to install again. I hit "cancel installation" upon which the game started to uninstall everything.
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Pentium II 300 MHz/AMD K6-III 450
128 MB RAM (256 recommended for XP)
8 MB DirectX compatible graphic card
4X CD-ROM drive
DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
350 MB available hard disk drive
DirectX 8.1 (included on disk)
QuickTime 6.0 (included on disk)
Recommended System Requirements:
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Pentium II 500 MHz, AMD K6-III 600
256 MB RAM
8 MB DirectX 8.1 compatible hardware-accelerated 3D graphics card
16-bit DirectX 6.1 compatible sound card
16x CD ROM drive
1.5 GB free hard drive space
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Petra
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Location: California
Reviews written: 328
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About Me:
If life gives you lemons ... there's always someone deserving of being pelted with fruit
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