CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for Xbox Reviews by Gamers

As the reigning king of television the past few years, CSI has spawned two spinoffs, a few competitive pretenders to the throne, and two PC games. Now those two PC titles (the self-titled CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: Dark Motives) have been melded together into one bargain-bin game for Xbox. Fans, don't rejoice so quickly. While CSI utilizes the voice-actors from the show and even employ one of CSI's writers to handle the scripting, this is a pretty mediocre effort.

CSI is made in the tradition of classic PC point-and-click mystery/adventure games. You play from a first-person perspective as a rookie investigator. Through each of the 10 cases, you'll be skipped around, working with different characters from CSI, each voiced by their real-life counterpart and modeled to look somewhat like the real deal. The set-up for each crime and the occasional true-to-the-show flashbacks are the two biggest selling points for CSI, but are only minor details amidst the scope of the entire game.

At the crime scene, it's your job scroll the cursor over objects, looking for hot spots that allow you to zoom in for a closer look. If you want any type of challenge at all, there are assists you can and should turn off to make it a little tougher to find the hot spots. Even without the assist, you can run the cursor over everything in the room, pressing A madly until you get lucky. Once you are inspecting an area, you can access any of the 15 CSI field tools. These are the same items used on the show and it's your task to figure out which tool to use where. The magnifying glass might help you spot a stray hair and the tweezers will help you collect it. Of you can use a UV light to search for hidden stains and there are multiple options for lifting fingerprints. The only problem is that if you choose the wrong tool, you can just go to the next one and keep trying until you get it right. This forgoes logic and allows for some mind-numbing acts of trial and error.

The collected evidence is then brought to the lab, where you can check it under the microscope or in the computer. What's great about this aspect is that if you play the game and watch the show, the interface is identical. It's a great job of recreating the look of the show, but the act itself is again, kind of simplistic. Enter a fingerprint, search for a match or confirm a match to another fingerprint on file. Yipee.

The real disappointment of CSI is the interrogation sessions. There's very little in the way of dynamic dialogue. Instead, you run down a list of questions, in whatever order you like. In some cases, bringing in a suspect too early may alter responses, but nothing ever makes CSI feel like a living, breathing investigation. Wouldn't it be cool to have criminals with different personalities, requiring you to read that attitude and adjust your questioning to elicit the answers you need?

Despite having 10 cases, the later half which are more interesting and longer, CSI can be beaten swiftly. But at least it's something pretty to look at, right? Not quite. The color palette isn't very deep, and reds and browns and all shades in-between tend to blend together. The textures are pretty weak, the animations are almost non-existent, and the lip-synching technology is just as old school as point-and-click gaming. On the plus-side, the voice acting is solid and the music is straight from the show, making it quite fitting with every scene.

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