JosephR's Full Review: Law & Order: Justice is Served for Windows
This was my first Law and Order computer game. I had seen the other 2 in the store, but the fact that I am a huge Law and Order fan AND a huge tennis fan, coupled with the fact that Dead on the Money came for FREE, compelled me to pull it off the shelf.
I was nothing but pleased. It was obvious that the game's authors spent a lot of time making sure the game had a great - not good, but great - story. There are at least 8 people who could very well have committed the murder and at least 20 total characters overall. And there is absolutely no "filler" - no wasted time, no wasted characters - every task you have to perform makes sense. Every person you have to interview provides information relevant to the story - to proving some suspect innocent or guilty.
I don't want to give away too much plot, because the less you know about the game when you go to play it the more you'll enjoy all of the surprises that come about. To put it in as few words as possible, a top tennis player was murdered at the U.S. Open. Her coach is Patrick McEnroe. Throughout the course of the investigation you meet her friends, relatives, agent, coach, rivals, stalkers blah blah blah and you just have to interview them all and try to figure out who did what, check their alibis, then gather enough evidence for an arrest warrant, then go to trial. In addition to gathering evidence, you can have surveillance done on suspects, do research on suspects and items found, send items to the lab, and have suspects subjected to psychiatric evaluations.
I played a little of the free Dead on the Money game that came with it, and what I immediately didn't like about that is how everywhere you go there's like 20 different clues you need to pick up, and usually only 1 or 2 are needed for the story. Justice is Served shields you from all that wasted time - if you can touch it, operate it or pick it up, there's about a 90% chance that it's relevant.
The user interface is very friendly and well-organized.
The only negative I can really think of is, it does kind of spoon-feed you the solution at some points. At the end of some interviews, they show cut scenes of Briscoe and the other guy having a post-interview private conversation where they tend to draw their own conclusions and point you to where to search next or who to interview next. It didn't bother *me* too much, but I'm sure that some of you out there want to figure everything out for yourselves.
Some of the puzzles you have to solve have nothing to do with the game. There's one puzzle where Briscoe is searching a warehouse with a bunch of stacked boxes and you have to move them around so he can get through - kind of like that 16-square puzzle with the numbers 1 through 15 with the one blank square. But some of the puzzles are very relevant - very early in the game you need to open the victim's locker. If you're observant, you'll know what the combination is right away. There's one puzzle where you assemble a torn-up letter. I'd say the ratio of irrelevant to relevant is about 2 to 1, but there's only like 10 puzzles total, and they certainly don't distract from the overall story in any way.
So to summarize, this is a very user-friendly and easy-to-play game with an absolutely outstanding and detailed story. If you are ANY type of murder mystery fan, you simply MUST get this game - it's GREAT!!!!
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