GENRE
	Adventure
	DEVELOPER
	White Birds
	PUBLISHER
	SouthPeak Games
	LOCAL WIRELESS MULTI-PLAY
	No
	Wi-Fi/GLOBAL ONLINE MULTI-PLAY
	No
	MICROPHONE
	Yes
	BUY NOW AT

Another review of this game couldn't have put it better-- Crime Scene is likely to frustrate you into making a crime scene of your own. While the prospect of a Mature-rated, forensics investigation-heavy adventure game sounds intensely appealing for any grown-up mystery or adventure game fan, Crime Scene's controls, characters and soundtrack combine into an atrocious experience that few will be able to finish.

This is a shame since there's definitely a market for this kind of game on DS, thanks to the success of Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, and a host of lesser-known mystery adventure games. Yet even Crime Scene's twisting, interconnected series of five cases, which will be entertaining to anyone who has loathed a job so much he wished he could take his entire company down, cannot remedy the near-broken game controls and obnoxious protagonist.

On paper, the gameplay sounds so right. Arrive at a bloody crime scene, scour the area for anything suspicious or worth collecting, and then use a suite of tools to extract the evidence. The evidence-collection tools include tweezers, a utility knife, cotton swabs, an ultraviolet lamp, fingerprint dusting equipment, a solution that makes dried solutions wet again for collection, and even an electro-static type device that can make tangible copies of footprints and tire tracks. Back at the police office, collected evidence is then analyzed with other tools-- a fingerprint database, a bullet caliber and rifling analysis tool, a microscope for cellular and particulate analysis, and a DNA sequencer.

Whether on the scene or at the lab, all of these tools trigger their own set of mini-games for utilization, and this is where the game falls apart. Most of the mini-games have a gameplay bug that will penalize the player to the point of ending the game, and nearly all of them have such obtuse or missing directions (especially the ridiculous DNA sequencer) that the gamer is doomed to initially flail figuring things out, and then be randomly penalized (to the point of the game over screen) when the game decides something's not to its liking. Whether tracing an outline to cut a piece of fabric from a chair, swabbing a blood stain for a sample, extracting fluid from pipette, or putting a simple piece of tape over a dusted fingerprint, you'll never know if you're going to be called "unprofessional!" because the game arbitrarily decided you did something wrong that you don't know how to correct.

The tape application is probably the most laughable and frequent bug. Sometimes the game is expecting the piece of tape to be tightly cropped around the fingerprint, sometimes it doesn't want the whole fingerprint covered, and sometimes an excessive amount of tape is expected. Each failed application causes an onscreen "competence" meter to deplete: if it runs out, it's game over. (You can sometimes refill this meter by getting certain things correct on the first try.) Yet each mistake results in a snide critique of your skill in tape application, making you feel like you've descended into some Goldilocks-themed circle of hell where everything's too big or too small and never just right. And that doesn't even get into the nitpicking the game starts when you try to peel the applied tape away-- just another example in a parade of gameplay bugs that persist from start to end.

When not sweeping your stylus over a crime scene for the fiftieth time, trying to find the one tiny thing that's needed to progress the story, you'll be spending time talking with other characters in the fake European city of Crossburg. Each of Crime Scene's cases involves many characters, from fellow police officers to scientists, prisoners, terrorists and important political figures. Depending on context, you'll interact in the form of conversations, interviews and even interrogations which offer a few "threaten" or "bargain" dialogue options. While sometimes hard to follow, the mysteries resolve satisfactorily and tie together in unexpected ways. All you have to do is reach a point where your director says it's time to get the arrest warrant put together, and you then place four to eight pieces of evidence into a dossier. Of course, this being an adventure game, the precise pieces of evidence the game expects for search or arrest warrants are often confounding, but that isn't a surprise in the genre.

However, main character Matt Simmons, a newly promoted detective with something to prove, is surprisingly charmless. If he's not thinking sarcastic thoughts about his coworkers or openly scoffing at their lame jokes, he's desperately trying to impress people and throw his weight around. Amusingly, the other characters often react with disdain and indifference to his posturing, but not so much that they impede resolution. Given the consequences, suicides and murders that result from his work, that he ends the game with an off-handed, Princess Peach cake-worthy quip, adds insult to injury.

While Crime Scene's graphics are serviceable, if a bit static and unanimated, the soundtrack is the last egregious element. There are only a handful of tracks used for the entire game, and all sound like a mix of bad trip-hop and early '90s cop show synthesizers, overlaid with an occasional, squealing police siren sound effect. Each composition is seldom melodic and anything but catchy. The game developers almost acknowledge the mediocrity of the music by having it permanently set at half the volume of the sound effects-- make the mistake of turning up your volume to hear it and you'll be blasted away by the "plink" one of your CSI tools makes. Really, the game would have been better with the option to turn the "music" off altogether.

Crime Scene's not a top-to-bottom failure, though. The mysteries are mature and not fantastical like many of Phoenix Wright's, and while they seldom feel urgent given the time you have to waste revisiting a crime scene or replaying mini-games, they're compelling. White Birds also layered on depth not often found in adventure games by adding the aforementioned "competency" scoring system: each case has four parts that will reward 150 points each if minimal mistakes are made, encouraging the gamer to go through a case again if the score's not maxed out. Yet this interesting take on adventure game replayability is trampled over by the game's horrific controls, which seem determined to keep you from a high score with arbitrary and unexpected penalties. Between the broken controls, the annoying protagonist and godawful soundtrack, Crime Scene is best left, to use police terms, in the dusty backroom of unsolved cases.

3.0/10