CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder is one of the series of successful games based on the hit TV series (or one of them – in this case, CSI: Las Vegas). The game consists of five crimes, each of which you have to solve using various pieces of evidence-gathering equipment, by questioning suspects and witnesses, and by using analytical skills.

You start out as a rookie detective and work with a different member of the team on each case, starting with Warwick Brown and ending up with the legendary Gil Grissom, who gives you an evaluation after each case is solved. Along the way, if you get stuck, you can ask your partner in crime-solving for clues, but this will affect your evaluation a little. (We – my wife and I – needed to ask for a hint on 2 of the 5 cases.) If you manage to solve the case and clear everything up without a single hint, you get “Master” rating, and with a hint or two you will get “Inspector” rating. There may be other ratings if you have to ask for more hints – perhaps there’s an “Idiot” rating? Each case has about 18 possible hints, and a total of around 40-50 individual pieces of evidence to collect.

Evidence comes in the form of fingerprints, fluid traces, track marks, shoe imprints etc, and various tools are at your disposal to find them. A sharp eye is needed and you have to select the right tool for the job, though most of the time this is obvious and you aren’t given access to many wrong options anyway. Though much of the time it’s a case of going over a scene again and again until you see the mouse cursor change, indicating you can do something there, you still feel as though you are hunting for clues. The interface works well most of the time, though there are definitely times when it is a bit too fussy. Basically you look for clues, question suspects and try to get enough evidence together to get a warrant for questioning, searching a location or finally an arrest warrant. To help you there is something called an “Evidence Trinity”, which is apparently something that’s used in real life, for linking suspects to the murder weapon, crime scene and victim. At first I wasn’t convinced that this was any help at all, but after playing the game for a while I came to appreciate its value.

The graphical environment lets you zoom in and out of key places and rotate around the crime scene etc, though in truth it still feels rather restrictive. The environments are portrayed quite well, though there is a strange tendency for some items to look distinctly two-dimensional. The characters are disappointing – mostly looking unrealistic (particularly the hair, which is just a block of textured colour with no movement at all), lip-synching not done very well at all, and characters often looking only vaguely similar to the character from the show they’re supposed to be portraying. The voice-acting is mostly superb, however, and the ambient music is excellent, so the game has plenty of atmosphere despite the graphics failing to impress.

The game play is pretty good, there’s just not enough of it – and, for anyone who’s played the previous games, it’s a bit too familiar. Not that I think they should mess around with a successful formula too much, but there should have been more of it. The five cases (which are nice and complex, more so than in the first CSI game) take probably 2-3 hours each to solve, and while you can go back and try it again without any hints or game helps... who’s going to want to do that? Also each case has (in addition to the Lab, Morgue and Brass’ office, where you can apply for warrants) only about thee or four locations to visit. What’s here is good, but it’s not really enough. Another couple of cases would definitely have earned this game another star in the rating.

CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder is rated 15 – “contains bloody forensic detail” – this game (especially some of its reconstruction videos) is definitely not for the squeamish. Obviously there are murders going on, you get to examine the corpse in detail, there are various bodily fluids here and there... it’s not exactly family-friendly stuff. The dialogue also contains some bad language – no F word but a few other words creep in. With the tension of the characters being interviewed, what with all the murders and suchlike going on, I suppose this is understandable and done to add realism to the game. That aside some of the dialogue is terrible – especially when the detectives are trying to be funny, or Grissom is doing his round-up assessments – it just tries too had, and sounds awful.

All in all this is a pretty good detective game, but not enough of an improvement over the first CSI game, and certainly not long enough, to warrant a 4-star rating. Still, fans of the show or detective games will enjoy it – I just question the replayability of such games (unless you have a long break in between). It was definitely worth playing though, as besides an eye for detail you do genuinely have a chance to use analytical skills and intuition to solve the cases. There are a few small bugs but nothing game-stopping. One final thing that made me decide it definitely wasn’t worth 3 stars was the highly improbably way some evidence can be found – the most bizarre example of this is some stained men’s underwear on the living room table of a grieving wife who is trying to convince you how faithful she’s been. Oh well... at the end of the day it’s a decent game but could have been much better – like so many games!


System Specs

OS: Windows XP / Vista (worked quite happily in Vista)
CPU: Pentium III 1 GHZ or above (ran on 1.8GHz Core Duo)
Graphics card: any 64Mb card or above (ran on 64Mb PCI-E card [nVidia GeForce 7500LE] – wouldn’t run High Detail level though)
HDD Space: 1.4GHz

Laptop graphics cards may not work with this game.

System tested on: Packard Bell iMedia J2489 Desktop PC

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