Posted 3/6/2010 at 9:05 AM By Judgeman
The Good: Wide array of tools and mini games help make it feel like a real crime scene investigation
The Bad: On the job training can be frustrating along with trial and error game play
Summary: South Peak Games brings us another occupational game, this time for the DS, called Crime Scene. Does Crime Scene win a place in our hearts or is it dead on arrival? Find out with our full review, After The Break!
Full Review:
STORY
In Crime Scene by South Peak Games, you play as forensic detective, Matt Simmons. The local police department has had a sudden job opening and you have just been hired and, for your first case, you must solve the double homicide of your predecessor and his wife. You and your partner, Pete, will have many tools at your command to solve this case and the many that will follow it.
The story really doesn’t have the flow that you normally would see in other games. Each case begins with the details and allows you to follow your leads until you discover all you can about the clues and suspects. You are then interviewed by your boss to see if you have your facts correct, then you move on to the next case. The cases are not connected in any way, so the story at times feels disjointed.
The one major issue that I had with the story in my playthrough was how the first case ended. After you determine the killer of former detective, Steven Connor, the wife’s murder is still unsolved. However, your boss arbitrarily attaches her death to the killer, making it a double homicide. This decision just sat with me the wrong way through out the rest of the game. I found it hard to believe that a decision as important as that would end up being made in such a way with no evidence to back it up!
GAMEPLAY
The game play of Crime Scene can be described as equal parts of point-and-click adventure and a series of mini-games. For those of us who are old enough to remember the hay day of point-and-click adventures, South Peak Games takes part of that and uses it in Crime Scene. Whenever you arrive at the crime scene, you have to look at the scene and determine what section of the scene you want to investigate first. This is done by dragging your stylus over the whole scene until your reticule turns into an eye. The eye means that you have found something that you can focus on and will contain an important clue.
The game will then focus on that particular interesting fact, whether it is a corpse or a bullet lodged in a wall. It is then up to you to use your forensic tools to remove the evidence carefully and to examine the area for more detail that can be used in the case. The tools at your disposal, at first, are fairly rudimentary. You have a cotton swab for fluids, a pair of tweezers for bullets and fragments, fingerprint dusting kit, and so on. Later in the game your tools become much more high tech, with a light that can detect dried fluid.
Once you have gathered your evidence and talked to the witnesses, you then need to analyze the clues to find out where the evidence will lead you. Whenever you analyze a clue, you go into a mini game depending on the type of clue it is. If you are analyzing blood, for instance, you will complete a mini game where you have to prepare the slide sample for investigation and get rid of the unwanted blood particles that prevent you from making a positive identity.
As you make a correct statement or use a tool correctly to identify a clue, you gain credibility. A blue gauge that will appear whenever you win or loose credibility represents this. At the end of a case, you are given points for the amount of credibility you still have left and that total determines your final score and rank. As you make mistakes during the investigation, your credibility is lowered, and once it reaches zero, you are fired! Hey, it’s a harsh rule but, then again, you are a forensic detective and aren’t allowed to make mistakes during an investigation.
For the most part, these mini games are executed very nicely and never feel all that repetitive. Most of these games are just complicated versions of a matching game; you have to match two fingerprints, gun types, or bullet shapes for example. Where I felt the gameplay gave me issues were in using the tools at the crime scene itself. I had a lot of trouble in using the tweezers, the swab and the knife to gather my evidence. The controls for these tools never felt quite right and led to me losing most of my credibility during the game - especially that swab tool! I would curl myself up into a ball and cry whenever I saw blood in the game, just because I knew I had to use that blasted swab tool. The issue is that I never quite figured out where the game wanted me to use that swab! I would dip the swap into the bloody patch, and it wouldn’t work. I would have to try it over and over until I finally found a patch that would work.
This leads me into my frustrations with the game. You begin the game and move right into your very first case, where you receive on the job training from your partner on how to use the tools at hand. If you make a mistake right away in using a tool, it immediately costs you credibility. Crime Scene could have easily used an “academy” level that should have taught you to how to use the tools in a crime scene. This would have acted as a tutorial, where the player could have practiced with all the tools prior to entering the real world of crime and murder. Also I feel that Crime Scene suffers from too much trial and error sometimes, especially where the swab tool is considered. Too many times the swab tool ended up with me trying over and over to find the correct bloody spot that the game wanted me to sample from.
All in all, even with the frustrations that I mentioned before, I feel that Crime Scene’s game play works quite nicely for the game. The more you play Crime Scene, the more adept you will become at using the tools and finding the evidence. I found by the time I reached my third case; I was a master at using the tools and was no longer loosing credibility every time I saw blood.
GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The Nintendo DS is not a graphics powerhouse nor does it have surround sound capability. Crime Scene won’t win any awards for Best Graphics come next year's Spike VGAs, but the graphics and sound work well for what it is meant to do. There are no voice-overs at all; all the dialogue being presented in text windows. The characters don’t move at all either, they are just pieces of artwork that you see on the top screen. The crime scenes are rendered nicely for a DS game, and enable you to see areas of clues without having to constantly click your stylus all over the screen.
As far as the sound goes, it really is just tonal music playing in the background with some sound effects during the mini games. The music didn’t draw my attention to it in the way the music from The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom did, but I also do not recall ever hating the music either. Crime Scene is the case in which the sound doesn’t really take the overall game experience to the next level, but it also does not detract from it.
IN CLOSING
Crime Scene by South Peak Games is an intriguing and fun crime scene investigation game for the Nintendo DS. While it has its faults in the gameplay and story department, these faults are not game-breaking and can be overlooked. The graphics and sound, though not spectacular, do a serviceable job in telling the story. Overall, Crime Scene is an adequate police detective game that will keep you occupied solving cases on the go. Crime Scene by South Peak Games is rated M for mature and is available for your DS now.
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