| Platform: | PC |
| Genre: | Mystery |
| Players: | 1 |
Judging by the screenshots on the box, I was expecting more. The graphics look okay, but it's very obvious to me that, while everything is computer-generated, it's not done on-the-fly like you see in first-person shooters and most action/adventure games. They did a decent job of making the characters look like the actors who play them on the TV series, I'll give them that much. But this game kind of feels like it was thrown together, an example of low-quality shovelware that so many games based on a popular TV/movie license are these days.
Gameplay is pretty repetitive. You basically look around in different areas (crime scene, victim's home, etc.) and click on what could be clues. There's a lot of stuff to sort through, stuff that ends up being totally unrelated to the crime. With a limited case file storage space, you have to be really selective about what you keep. Especially when you consider that a piece of evidence and the lab reports regarding the findings on that evidence each take up a slot.
Next to none. They do give you a choice of four different areas of expertise for your detective/lawyer, so you could conceivably replay the game using the talents that you didn't pick last time, but since there's only the one case to solve, you wouldn't really see anything remarkably different about the game.
This was one of those $20 Wal-Mart bargain-bin specials. Not a bad price for a few hours worth of pretending to be a cop and a lawyer, but this game certainly isn't going to win any awards. There is a sequel in the works, which I may end up getting if it's another $20. I'm a big fan of Law & Order and its spinoffs, so I wanted this game to be better than it is. I was hoping for truly 3D environments that you could freely move around in, but I ended up with QuickTime VR scenes where the camera is stuck in one place, even though it can look around after a fashion.