CSI: Deadly Intent - The Hidden Cases for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

Even if you're not a fan yourself, you're certainly familiar with CSI. The hour-long crime drama has been a CBS fixture for nearly a decade now, enjoying huge audiences and incredible ratings success as it showcases a stylized vision of what happens behind the scenes with criminal investigators working in Sin City. Its massive appeal has inspired a couple of spin-offs over the years, and more than a couple video games.



Unfortunately, the show's success hasn't always made the transition to the games intact -- the one previous time CSI made the jump to Nintendo's DS was a disappointment. It was 2007's CSI: Dark Motives, and it was a pretty lazy port of an outdated PC game from years earlier -- starring the cast of characters from 2004 and feeling, as our own Jack DeVries put it, "like watching old reruns of the show on Spike." Ouch.



CSI: Deadly Intent -- The Hidden Cases, then, is the franchise's second shot on Nintendo's portable platform. And, luckily, this one's no rerun. This is an all-new, DS-exclusive design that stars the cast of characters currently in play on the show every Thursday night on CBS -- that includes Dr. Raymond Langston (played by Laurence Fishburne) who just joined the show as a regular cast member in Season 9.



Ray is your primary partner in investigating crime scenes, as you use the stylus and touch screen to scroll around a view of each environment and highlight potential pieces of evidence. When you've found something interesting, your cursor will light up -- then you'll have to choose the right tool to use to retrieve it. Some are straightforward, like just picking the hand icon to grab something off the ground. Others trigger mini-games, like dusting for fingerprints -- you'll use the stylus as a brush there, then blow into the DS mic to remove any excess dust.



The mini-games continue back at CSI headquarters, where you'll piece together molecule puzzles when analyzing unknown chemical substances, control tweezers to extract foreign objects from dead bodies down in the morgue, reconstruct corrupted data files by comparing data sets displayed on both DS screens and more. All the while you're attended to and advised by the rest of the CSI cast -- Catherine, Al, Captain Brass. They're all there.



It's ultimately an authentic take on the CSI formula, even going so far as letting you interrogate suspects and catch them in lies with your gathered evidence -- but it's all pretty linear. There isn't much flexibility in how each case progresses, and you might sometimes feel like you're just tapping along on the touch screen to advance a pre-determined plot progression rather than really interacting with the events and characters being presented to you.



There's no way to lose, in other words. The only thing you're really working toward, gameplay-wise, is a better star rating at the conclusion of each case -- you'll be evaluated on how quickly and efficiently you processed evidence, whether you picked the right tools to acquire that evidence from the crime scene and whether you chose the right evidence to present to suspects in the interrogation room. You'll be able to replay cases later on if you don't score the gold rating the first time around, but that probably wouldn't be all that entertaining to do -- it really would be like watching a rerun.

©2010-01-07, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved