"The hit TV show pumps out a seemingly rushed sequel."

CSI reminds you of murder mysteries and tracking down criminals to apprehend them for their crimes to the public. It reminds you of the cunning wit and advanced thinking capabilities of John Grissom and his team, solving every case one by one, step by step. Does this game follow that well-known format? Well, sort of. Instead of playing as Grissom, you play as his top-choice new hire for the CSI team. To get you in line, he sends you on five cases (yes, there are only five cases on this game) to get you ready to be a CSI. For those who don't know, CSI stands for Crime Scene Investigation/Investigator, and it concerns forensics teams that inspect every inch of every crime scene and analyze every detail to solve a particular case.

True to the popular TV show, you have every famous member of the CSI team right along with you, one for each case. Grissom is your assigner, so you never work directly with him. Jim Brass is responsible for assigning interrogations and warrants, and giving you the locations of particular places and extra information on suspects. Just as with any typical crime scene, everyone associated with the crime scene in any way is considered a suspect. False leads like rat poison in a homeless man's body and suspects who refuse to talk continuously hinder your progress in this step-by-step breakdown of solving a mystery. You'll even encounter suspects that try to clean up the mess they left at the crime scene to keep your forensics team from finding incriminating evidence against them. Every single piece of evidence is as important as any other, with some pieces just barely able to tell a little more to the story than others. Missing any piece of evidence hinders your progress, even something as miniscule as a piece of glass wedged inside of a baseball bat, which links a particular person to a crime scene because the glass matches the strength of someone's prescription eyeglass. This can get extremely frustrating at times though, because you will pull your hair out trying to find that one piece of evidence you missed, and it is something that seems so insignificant yet has everything to do with the case and is your lead to interrogate a suspect. The game requires you to be as thorough as you possibly can be, and then some, otherwise you'll never find everything you need to find. You'll even enlist the help of morticians, who examine the remains of a body in a murder mystery and tell you everything from the time of death (although sometimes discovering a larvae at the place the body was found is necessary for this) to the chemicals that existed in the victim's body at the time of death, as well as even telling you leads for just how the victim may have been killed. You can get a hint from your particular partner for a case, but in the end when Grissom evaluates how you did in the case, you lose points for not figuring it out entirely on your own. Grissom also gives you a set of five observational challenges at the end of every case that test just how much you observed and if you noticed simple things like what the back of the police truck says. How many you get right determines your rank at the end of each case. Before you can call a suspect in for interrogation or obtain a warrant to search his/her area, you must make a strong connection by Grissom's Trinity of Evidence - link the suspect to the victim and to the crime scene; that is, the suspect must have done something at the crime scene and had some connection to the victim. Just a hunch isn't enough for an interrogation or a warrant - you have to prove that your suspect is hiding something, and you prove it through evidence. Before you can convict, every suspect has to have a strong link for three things - motive, opportunity, and method - why did the suspect do it, when did the suspect do it, and how?

You're given many different tools to help you on your way. Fingerprint identifiers help to reveal hidden fingerprints on just about anything, and you can lift them for later use. Blood spray identifies whether or not a substance is blood, allowing you to link the evidence with DNA. Gloves and tweezers collect larger and smaller pieces of evidence, and cotton swabs collect liquid. You can even lift tire treads and footprints and match them up with other ones to prove that a suspect was at the crime scene at some point.

There aren't many sounds or much to the background music here mostly because the main focus is on collecting evidence and figuring out who did what and where, and why. The background music that's there reminds me a lot of Resident Evil's music - slow and methodical to give it that creepy feel.

Graphics are crisp and smooth, but the one thing that really bugs me is how the characters talk. Their mouths merely move up and down pretty dryly. This day and age in the video game industry, with all the advances being made, I expect to see a game whose characters' mouths move in-sinc with how they talk. Other than that, everything looks good, and it would have to to be able to pick up on very small pieces of evidence.

The controls get a little complicated with all of your different tools, but usually by the time you're about finished with your first case you've mastered everything. The learning curve for this game is fairly steep, so you have to be very patient. One thing that bothers me as far as control goes is that your character cannot walk around. This severely limits your mobility (obviously) and somewhat takes away from the game. The most that you can do is rotate your character 360 degrees to look around. In some places, you can't move at all - your line of sight is focused in only one direction.

Overall: 7/10
This game captures the overall feel of the popular TV show, but it is flawed. I don't feel that it's worth the $30 price tag at the launch simply because there are so few cases to solve. More cases to make the game last longer would have been much better, because let's face it, once you solve everything once, what's the use in doing it again? Nothing new happens, the cases don't change, and you already know what you have to do and how. Also, as I stated above, the game can get very frustrating when you're missing only one tiny piece of evidence, and that's what is keeping you from moving on. Still, it's a great game for people who are very observant, and who like solving cases. It's too bad there's no pre-play for PC games.

Thumbs in the middle.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/04/04