CSI: Deadly Intent

Reviewing a CSI game is distinctly hard. Not because of the content or quality of the product or experience, but because a significant portion of the players enjoyment of this game will be based souly on how much they like (or how big their tolerance is for) the TV show.

Spread across 5 “episodes” this game is a point and click detective experience, tasking you in the role of the new guy in the Las Vegas CSI lab. There is an over arching story going on in the back ground, much like the TV show, but mostly you will focus on each individual case as they come along to the exclusion of the others.

Each mission breaks down virtually identical to each other. You start with a cinematic showing the murder take place, then you gather evidence; you take that back to your lab and test it. Get enough to bring someone in to question, get them to crack and give you access to some new place, get that evidence and repeat till the killer is found. Typically each case takes about an hour to finish, and besides a couple times, the logic chains (what I call the process of seeing something, thinking of where the evidence would be and what I need to use that evidence for) are typically straight forward and easy to follow.

For what it is the graphics are fine, looking like you are walking around a Sims game, and the interface is typically unobtrusive and easy to navigate, with the exception of how slow your cursor can move during certain lab experiments. Being a point and click there is no need for crazy control schemes and what they have here is perfectly fine for what it does. Finding evidence is especially easy seeing that all you have to do is mouse over the scene until the cursor changes, and besides one point in the game all evidence is pretty much out in the open from the start.

Voice acting, see, here is the very strange part of this whole game. The actors from the show do the in game voices, and for the most part are exceptionally good with the turds for lines that they are handed (especially the terrible one liners that CSI is known for). However Laurence Fishburne, of Apocalypse Now, Boyz N the Hood and Matrix fame; a pretty talented actor in his own right, is absolutely terrible. Delivering his lines in such a stilted and monotone voice that you have to assume that he either was mailing this in for a check or was making a point to someone that he did not want to do voice acting for a game again.

All of what I said is fine and dandy, but heres the thing. If you like CSI, I mean really like that show, then this game is 100% for you. It is literally a six hour CSI episode; it has the same terrible murder premises, the same bad writing and the same terrible understanding of how the American judicial system works. Which, amazingly enough makes for one of the highest rated Television shows on the air. For those of you that hate CSI, avoid this game, even if you like point and clicks, I’ll even use the same reasoning for you; it’s a six hour CSI episode.

However, if you are a die hard point and click fan I’m not sure how much this game is for you either. As an experiment I simply muted my TV and played, collecting stuff that changed my cursor, going to the lab when that stopped happening, going to Brass to get warrants when that window popped up and repeating. There are no leaps of logic here, there is no deduction. All items that you can collect have a purpose for the case; there are no red herrings or dead ends to follow. I finished that episode in the exact same amount of time as the previous ones, no idea what was happening on the screen but I didn’t need to know that.

It almost becomes a simple picture hunt, a set of processes that lead to the inevitable conclusion of the CSI lab techs mysteriously interrogating a lawyerless subject who, in incriminating himself is the only REAL reason you solve the case.

I guess what Im saying is that this game will really only appeal to the CSI fans, and luckily for the developer, there are millions of those.