Customer Reviews

Art of Murder: FBI Confidential

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This game was good and I'm not disappointed with this purchase. It had potential to be really good, but there is only one game I give credit as being excellent, which is Still Life.

This is a point & click 3rd person adventure/crime/investigate type of game. At first I thought it might not be ok because they said it has 100 puzzles/riddles and 5000 lines of dialogue. I don't care much for puzzles, I just want the story & adventure to play. The puzzles are not time consuming or illogical to the game (no arcades, mazes, sliders) just put together items to place & two somewhat challenging puzzles which you may or may not need a walkthrough for...located at GameBoomers.

The dialogue was fine, didn't seem too much or boring & it also did not have the dialogue tree of choices which I was glad of. So it turned out to be a good game to me. The story is interesting & easy to follow, no nonsense or running around for no good reason. You won't get lost or wonder where to go next. The voice acting is good especially the main character & her boss.

As the game progresses it gets better because the story is written well with several characters as suspects & a trip to Peru added a nice change to the gameplay & scenery. This is one game I can say had a good ending all though it was intentionally dark. Still, you could see well enough what was going on & it was intense! I also like how they leave you wondering about something, but if you followed the story closely, you'll figure it out. :)

I thoroughly enjoyed this game and was sad when it ended. Yes, it was linear but it helped me from getting completely confused. I'm a gamer that finds all the clues first in all areas and eventually have to find a way to use them. If you don't find all the clues than you must before you can get to the next level. There were a few spots that I had to use a walkthrough, if I didn't I would have gone bald from pulling my hair out to find the solution. Overall, it's a fun game for the novice point and click gamers and more advanced ones too. I only had one bug in the game but it seem to resolve itself.

"The Art of Murder: FBI Confidential" is a game with plenty of potential, but it never lives up to its promise. You play as Nicole Bonnet, a rookie FBI agent who is assigned to a series of grisly homicides in New York City. It seems like the point-and-click adventure format would be perfect for this kind of investigation, but the game undercuts this at every turn. There are several reports, including blood tests and dental records, but the player is never allowed to actually look at them. There are also chemical tests which involve nothing more than sticking a sample in a test tube and waiting for the answer to magically appear on-screen. Even the dialogue has been simplified; there are no dialogue trees and no choices for what to say to the other characters. This is a detective game that eliminates all the actual detection.

Puzzles range from easy to frustratingly illogical. One puzzle involves combining inventory items to fix a cell phone. Unfortunately, this task can only be performed by placing the items on a teeny-tiny hotspot which suddenly appears on your desk, and there is absolutely nothing to warn players that this is the case. There's also at least one puzzle where you can (and probably will) die, though fortunately the game autosaves before this puzzle.

By far the biggest drawback to this game is Nicole herself. It's very hard to enjoy a game when you dislike the main character, and boy, did I dislike her. To begin with, Nicole is a weakling who runs like an idiot and complains that a ream of paper is too heavy (um, don't FBI agents have to go through training?). Plus, her voice acting is awful. The actress doesn't sound like she even understands her lines half the time. The one line where she shows real feeling, though, is when you try an incorrect combination, and then she sneers, "That was stupid." She says that a lot. Her other go-to phrase is "What would Nick [her partner] do?" and since the game actually goes to elaborate lengths to keep you from meeting Nick, that's a super-annoying question. Frankly, I don't know what Nick would do unless it involves skipping work again, and that doesn't help me solve the puzzle.

As far as the plot goes, it is pretty easy to pick out the murderer, and then it's just a matter of waiting for Nicole to catch up with you. This is a short game (it took me about 8-9 hours), but it felt much longer, mostly because every plot twist is telegraphed far in advance. All in all, this is an uninspired game with a bad actress and a paint-by-numbers plot. You can do better than this game, and you probably should.

"Art of Murder, FBI Confidential" looks like it should be a great adventure game. An attractive, female main character, wonderful graphics, a creepy story line - all the ingredients needed for a successful game. But the sad fact is all those positive elements can't make up for the many defects in the game. First of all, the game is tedious. Your character, Nicole Bonnet, needs to collect numerous items to do even the most mundane task. For example, she needs to activate a cellphone whose battery has been destroyed. But even though she has a replacement battery she can't just use the new battery to activate the cellphone - she must find other items to combine with the new battery and they can only be combined at a particular location. With all this make work it's easy to lose track of overall story, which itself is not all that compelling. Second of all the writing is poor. The game is made in Poland and the writers were obviously not familiar with American idioms. You'd think the awkward phrases would have been corrected when the game was converted to English, but they weren't. Third, the voice acting is fair overall except where it matters most - the main character. Nicole Bonnet's voice actress is abysmal. She sounds like an airhead Valley girl but with a total lack of emotion, and is very difficult to listen to. After several hours of joyless gameplay I realized that things weren't getting better and I gave up. The only reason I give it two stars overall is the graphics, but good graphics are not enough to make this game worthwhile.

Overall, this game was pretty fun. It was a point and click game, which I like. The game had several different cool scenes to visit, so it had some variety. I also liked that you couldn't leave an area if you hadn't found all of the clues. One thing to keep in mind was that when saving/loading the game it was pretty slow, so just be patient. Good game overall.

Art of Murder: FBI Confidential looks intriguing, but fails to entertain as a modern, 3rd person point-and-click game.
The main character's voice acting is horrible, trying to be funny in spots where it more inappropriate and annoying than laughable. She is a wimpy female character with poor detective skills. As the player, I felt I knew more about crime scenes than her. She repeats herself to often, makes incoherent sentences, and states that a bag of drugs is a "very useful thing" and a bronze statue head is "irreplaceable equipment." Um...okaaay.
The plot, involving ritualistic murders and the ancient Incan civilization has been used so many times that I found the story quite boring and uninteresting.
The only points I did like about the game were the nice graphics and sound. Since this game is quite shorter than other games of its genre, that made it easier for me to finish it without giving up on ever finding out what happens to the characters. That being said, the ending was unsatisfying.

I highly recommend a 3rd person game like Still Life or Black Mirror instead of this game. For something less macabre, try The Longest Journey or the Runaway games.

I thought this game was a lot of fun. The puzzles are intriguing (though sometimes a bit frustrating), the story line is enticing, and the character is interesting. I enjoyed playing the game immensely. I really like the fact that you have so many different locations to explore and that you can jet set all over the world.

What I don't like is that on Day 8, when I am finally in Peru, I am about to cross the bridge... the game crashes (tried it 3 times, starting from my previous save points the first time and from the beginning the second time). I looked for a patch... the game doesn't even have a website. I emailed the producers of the game and got a response to the effect that my save point was broken and I had to start over. When I said I had started from the beginning after it crashed the second time, I never got a response.

So I'd say the game is fun, I guess, but I'm really disappointed I didn't get to find out how it ends and that their customer support is terrible.

This game was fun and it had a good plot to it. Its only downfall was that it was too easy. I'm used to playing games that take me months or several weeks to beat. This game was really short and straight to the point. There is only one location you can go at a time, it won't let you leave a location until you have done everything, the puzzles are super easy, and there is not too many locations to explore, and there is a hint button (as if you need it). I like a challenge; something that will make me have to think for a while, and this game didn't offer that. Plus, whoever does the voice for Nicole Bonnet is a lousy actress. She shows no emotion or excitement. However, the game does have some interesting parts that kept me going. Overall, it is a fun game, if your prepared to beat it in just a few days with a minimal effort.

OK, my first clue that this wasn't going to be a great game was that there is only one loading disk and the whole thing loaded in less than 2 minutes. There is not much detail, the puzzles are pretty easy, and there is not much that can be looked at. The only things that can be examined are the objects that are to be used. This makes deciding what you need to collect to solve a puzzle a "Duh". Navigation is good, and I didn't run into any glitches, just not what I consider a good challenging complex game.

This game has very nice graphics, good story, NYC locations, good dialoge,and i found it hard to stop playing.The puzzles make sense and cut scenes are good.There is some CSI type investigating which makes the game feel real.The only thing i find wrong with this game is it is easy, you can not leave a location until you figure out what to find or do, this helps so you are not running around all over the place which is nice but it makes it alittle too easy.

overall it is a must play for adventure fans...just alittle too simplistic