Law & Order: Dead on the Money

"On the sole count of the indictment, being an unenjoyable game to play, we find the defendent, Law and Order: Dead on the Money...guilty"

''In the computer game industry, games based on TV shows and movies are divided into two separate yet equally important groups: those that emulate their source well, and those that don't. These are their stories.''

*Chung-chung*

Being a die-hard Law and Order fan, I was thrilled when I heard that there was going to be a game based off of it. After playing it, however, I have to say that I'm extremely disappointed.

The game starts off with a plot worthy of a Law and Order episode: Jenny Russ, a Wall Street investment broker, has been strangled to death in Central Park. You, as a partner to Detective Briscoe, must investigate the crime and arrest the person responsible. Once that's done, the game's second half begins. In this half, you (as an Assistant District Attorney) need to prosecute the suspect in a court of law and convince the jury to return a guilty verdict.

Let me start off with the good points of the game. First, for the most part, the graphics are great. The characters from the Law and Order series look very well done, and the cut-scenes usually flow pretty smoothly.

Additionally, the voice-acting is very well done. Fans of the show will instantly recognize Jerry Orbach voicing the ever-jaded Detective Briscoe, as well the other well-known characters that appear with their respective actors voicing them.

As far as an emulation of the show, the game does a pretty good job. Just about everything an L&O fan can expect, from the wit and witticisms of Detective Briscoe to the famous Law and Order ''chung-chung'' transitions that appear when a new scene is investigated, appears in this game, making it feel as though you're in the middle of an episode from the show.

Control is pretty easy to handle. The interface used is perfect for a game like this.

So why does the game get such a bad score? The answer is simple: the flaws that plague this game are so annoying and frustrating that playing the game becomes more a chore than a leisure activity. Let's go over them one by one:

First of all, the clues that need to be found at various crime scenes can be frustratingly difficult to make out because they can be so small. Using the magnifying glass that is part of the interface in Detective mode, you can zoom in on a piece of evidence and investigate it further, but every time you do that, a little time is taken away. And with only 56 hours to arrest the perpetrator (7 days with 8 hours each), the time wasted on pieces of litter that looked like evidence at first can quickly add up.

Another problem is that the game's case file (where pieces of empirical evidence are stored for later use, as well as summaries of witness questioning and the like) is too small for the game. There are only 52 spaces, which may seem like a lot at first, but you soon realize that it's not nearly enough. You have to be a packrat to succeed in the Detective mode, because even the most innocuous piece of evidence may be important later, but the game prevents you from doing that by forcing you to toss out evidence to make room for more. If you toss out the wrong piece of evidence, your whole investigation might go down the drain, making it necessary to repeat the entire game (unless you saved at a good point).

Probably the most frustrating problem with the game, however, is its maddening tendency to freeze up on you without warning, forcing you to restart your computer and repeat everything you did from your last save point (which can be a while if you were on a roll). It's perhaps this flaw more than any other that makes the game so un-enjoyable. When you're forced to repeat what you've already done two or three times before, the game becomes repetitive and tedious rather than enjoyable, completely killing the game.

I really wanted to like Law and Order: Dead on the Money more than I did. But I can't find any way to justify liking a game that put me through so much frustration due to mechanical failures and a poor execution of a great idea. If the flaws were fixed, this game would get a better score, but as it stands, this is my verdict: don't bother with this one.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/03, Updated 01/12/03