CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Hard Evidence

"A Game This Bad Should Be Criminal"

The CSI franchise has proved to be a very successful enterprise. The original series, CSI: Las Vegas was so successful that CSI: Miami and CSI: New York were also released, indicating that either people love crime shows or television producers are suffering from a crippling lack of creativity. Rather than releasing more of these television shows (CSI: Portland or CSI: Omaha somehow seem less compelling), the franchise instead expanded into other mediums, including books and video games. The Vegas series has released numerous video games for both the computer and home console, the most recent of which is CSI: Hard Evidence for the 360. Essentially, the game plays somewhat like a watered down version of the show, as you work to unravel fairly straightforward cases that are just not as compelling as what the show itself offers. Additionally, the gameplay is extremely basic point and click type stuff, and the game gets dull before the first case is over. While the franchise itself might be booming, this game is a total bust and even hardcore CSI fanatics might want to pass on this one.

In CSI:HE, you play the role of the rookie on the team, who happens to be mute and possibly bodiless, as you never actually happen to see or hear your character. Despite what some might consider to be a crippling lack of voice and body for this line of work, it doesn't seem to have hampered your career as you are immediately thrown into the role of crime scene investigator (complete with your own set of fingerprint powder!). You work to solve a series of five cases with the help of the familiar faces from the CSI: Las Vegas television show. All of the shows mainstays appear, most of which are voiced by their actual actor or actress from the show. While it is a nice touch to hear the actual characters, the acting job is surprisingly poor. While the roles on the show aren't particularly nuanced, they at least don't act like the monotone robots they play in this game. A couple of the CSI characters do a nice job, and some of the characters in the minor cases are actually well voiced and deliver good performances, but it was somewhat disappointing that most of the cast just phoned in their performance. Overall, the sound and graphics are only average. While the scenes themselves are fairly well animated, and the flashes of actual Vegas shown throughout the cases are nice, the characters themselves don't look like anything that should be appearing on the 360 and tend to be overly blocky. This isn't a huge issue, and most of the characters look like their counterparts from the show, but a little more effort put into this would have made the game look so much better. The music is solid, but the voice acting is not, and even most of the actors from the show are shame inducingly bad.

There are a total of five cases is CSI:HE, and in each case you are supported by one of the main cast members that will help you process the scene. Well, help is perhaps too generous a term, as you will be the one collecting evidence and solving the case. Each case revolves around some murder or attempted murder, and it is up to you to follow the evidence and help clean the streets of Las Vegas. At each location, a little arrow will appear and you can move this arrow around by using the joystick. Each area usually includes more to look at than can be shown on the screen at one time, and by moving the arrow around you can browse through the entirety of the area one screen at a time. If something or some area can be looked at more closely, the cursor turns green and clicking on it will allow you to inspect the area more thoroughly. It is at screens like this that you can collect evidence, and if some evidence can be collecting, your cursor will turn green again to alert you to this fact. Now, you can swab for blood, collect imprints, or just pick up entire pieces of evidence. This is pretty much how most of your quest for justice will be spent, and once you collect evidence you can go back to the lab to process it. Most of the evidence is in some very overt location, and it is sort of hard to miss giant tire tracks that have cut across someone's yard. However, some evidence is hidden very well and only by slowly going over the entire screen will you find it. This can prove extremely frustrating at times, and some locations will need to be visited multiple times to find some little scrap of evidence that you overlooked. Worse, your partner in each case provides the most useless hints possible, and instead of giving you some sort of indication as to what you should be looking for to proceed, he or she will say something along the lines of “You should search this area again, because I think you're missing something” or “There's something else to do here” or “Generic useless comment here.” Thanks jerk. I could've figured that out when the game wouldn't proceed to the next segment, but you just sit there against the wall for the entire case while I do all the heavy lifting. Grumble grumble…

Looking for stuff and dealing with a frustratingly lazy partner prove to be the only obstacles provided by the game, as the rest of the gameplay is extremely boring and simple. Once you collect evidence, you have to process it in the lab. Collect DNA and run it through the analyzer to try and get a match. DNA, fingerprints, tire treads, and other goodies are waiting to be compared in lab, and matching evidence and solving crimes proves to be something that can be solved by most third graders. You just look at a fragment of a fingerprint, or at the DNA sequence provided, and see which other sample it matches with. There is not enough similarity that those that can match basic shapes and colors should have any problem, and even if you do nothing bad happens; your partner finally chimes in to let you know that those fingerprints don't match and you should try again. There are a couple of times that you have to assemble something on the table by moving the pieces around, but these prove to be really simple tasks that are almost on par with assembling a twelve piece puzzle. As such, the analysis of the evidence proves to be incredibly dull, but there really isn't anything that could be done about this. Perhaps the difficulty of the matching could have been increased, or some sort of penalty implemented for an incorrect answer, but this game simulates how boring it must be to process evidence in a lab.

To break up this monotony with a higher level of monotony, there are times when you get to grill a suspect in the interrogation room, or ask witnesses questions, but these are all pretty much done for you. A list of questions appears, and regardless of which order you ask them in you get all the same information in the end. They might have well just put these segments into extended cutscenes, because clicking on preset questions to ask doesn't really count as gameplay. It would have been nice if some sort of interactivity was implemented into this part of the game, where you could get individuals to talk to showing evidence that they can react to, but the way it was set up means that there are extended chunks of the game that pretty much just elaborate on the story, and will leave you clicking through lots of text without any effect on the outcome.

This might have been forgivable if the story had been halfway decent, but the majority of the cases are extremely predictable and lack the sort of storytelling that made the television shows so popular. Case 4 is perhaps the only exception, where a blind woman's husband is murdered in his home, without any clear motive or suspects initially. This case is told at a nice pace, and while it does get fairly predictable towards the end, the build-up and story around exactly what happened was well told and well acted. Unfortunately, this proves to be the exception rather than the norm, and the rest of the cases aren't very interesting and are very straightforward. While CSI isn't the best written show on television, the video game scripts are poor by the show's standards, or even by middle school English paper standards. There really isn't any sort of emotional driving force behind any of these cases, and each one just seems to somehow be more dull than the one preceding it. Your main motivation won't be any legitimate curiosity or desire to solve some intriguing case, but rather just to get it over with so you can hopefully get to more interesting future cases (hint: you won't).

CSI:HE is just one of those games that doesn't have anything special going for it. There are a couple of nice features, like one interesting case and a couple of well acted roles, but these aren't enough to play through the entire game. The gameplay is simple and dull, the writing is poor, the dialogue is shoddy, and most of the time is spent either matching simple patterns or searching for some tiny sliver of evidence that you couldn't quite see, even after your fourth time through the area. There are only a total of five cases, and with each one only being around an hour or so in length, this is a game you can finish in a day. Frankly, even if there were ten cases this still wouldn't be worth the money as the game is just so dull that what is there just isn't fun to play. Even fans of the show should steer clear of this title and stick to reruns, as CSI:HE is a waste of money and time.

Case Closed (THE GOOD):
+A couple of the cases show promise and seem somewhat interesting
+Many of the stars from the show reprise their roles
+Easy to use control scheme that makes browsing crime scenes simple

Hung Jury (THE BAD):
-Outdated graphics that look silly on the 360
-Most cases are boring and provide little incentive to plod through them
-Gameplay is almost non-existent, and collecting and processing evidence is brainless
-Some small evidence is easy to overlook, and it is easy to get stuck for long periods
-Game is very short and can be completed within a day
-Even with the show's cast, the voice acting is just plain bad

Mistrial (THE UGLY): There are a total of five achievements in this game, and you receive one for beating each case. While most games provide some sort of extra challenge or quest in order to earn all of the achievements, I guess they figured that playing CSI: HE was enough of a chore itself and merely getting through this awful game was enough.

THE VERDICT: 2.50/10.00

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/30/09

Game Release: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Hard Evidence (US, 09/26/07)