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67 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great story & characters … but lots of bugs, October 30, 2005
This review is from: Law & Order: Criminal Intent (CD-ROM)
I’ve been a big fan of Legacy Interactive’s “Law & Order” game series. I was so exited to get “Criminal Intent”, I had the order pending for 6 months with overnight delivery so that I wouldn’t have to wait an extra day to play it. I then was rather disappointed when I tried to play it—the video was messed up to the point of making the game unplayable. But more on the bad stuff later.
The Good Stuff
“Law & Order: Criminal Intent” is an interactive adventure game that takes you into the mind of Detective Goren, the star character on the hit TV show of the same name. The game is a mystery adventure with a strong psychological bent. You examine crime scenes, gather evidence, and ask questions—a lot of questions. Fans of the show will be delighted that the mind games & plot twists are even more prominent in the game. Vincent D’Onofrio and Jamey Sheridan do an excellent job with the voice-overs for their characters. The only possible downside to the presentation is that it is very linear—you are pretty much stuck in a narrative, and there are only a few things that you are able to do out of order.
You don’t have to be a fan of the show to play & enjoy the game, though. If you, like me, enjoy adventure games in general (like Sierra’s classic “King’s Quest”), you’ll find Law & Order: Criminal Intent a good addition to an underserved genre.
If you’ve played previous Law & Order games, you’ll find that Legacy Interactive has refined its technique over time, removing some of the more tedious aspects of the game play. It used to be not-so-obvious whether evidence was critical to the game. In previous games, as a rule you would pick up everything in sight and then have to send it separately to both the lab & to research. This has improved dramatically in this edition. “Send to Lab” and “Send to Research” have been consolidated into “Analyze.” The “Analyze” function will automatically send an item to both the lab & research. “Analyze” is also used for witnesses; every person you analyze will go to both to research & to surveillance.
The number of items that need to be analyzed has also been drastically reduced. In many cases, merely looking at an item without analyzing it is sufficient. The game lets you know this by not giving you the analyze option for these items. That they’ve done so without making the game less challenging is a big kudos to Legacy Interactive. You can still do silly things like analyze incidental characters or the coroner’s report, but in another kudos they’ve actually provided substantial (but irrelevant) responses. No more boilerplate “subject was observed doing nothing interesting”.
Questioning witnesses is a big part of the game. A divergence from the earlier games, rather focusing on what questions to ask, the focus is on how the questions will be asked (Straightforward, Deceptive, Confrontational, Empathetic, or Flattering). Real-life detectives know the importance of elicitation, and this is a fresh and welcome interface in the game. Depending on the difficulty level you choose, you may finding yourself having to let witnesses cool off quite a bit!
Another deviation from previous L&O games is that it is third-person rather than first-person. Although it is kinda cool, and adds some authenticity, I’m not sure as to how much it really added to my gaming experience. Were the interface not so darn buggy, it might have been better… which leads me to:
The Bad Stuff
As a former quality assurance engineer for a software publisher, I’m sympathetic to how difficult it is to assure a game will work on all systems. Every computer is unique, and especially with the variety of graphics cards and iterations of DirectX out there, making sure it works with every combination is nearly impossible. That being said, I’ve installed & played a lot of games (including previous Law & Order games) without any of these issues. I think Legacy Interactive dropped the ball on this one. Maybe once the first software patches are released things will be much better... I sure hope so, because 90% of my Bad Stuff is technical in nature.
1) No graphics bug
The first time I loaded Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the non-interactive video worked, but in the main gameplay, only the characters and items were visible—everything else was black! Downloading new video drivers corrected the problem, but my old drivers were not that old, and I had played numerous other games (including the other three Law & Order Games and ER, all by Legacy Interactive) without any issues.
2) Where’s the online support?
A week after the game had been released, there were still no entries for the game on Legacy Interactive’s support site. When emailing tech support, “Criminal Intent” wasn’t even an option—I had to select a different game to finish the online form! They might have corrected this by the time you are reading this review, but it is still not a good sign that they were behind the times.
3) Does not play well with others
If you minimize it, you are never coming back to it…and, since it takes up 98% of CPU time, you are lucky if you can load Task Manager to shut it down. It hogs memory, taking up over 500 MB on my system out of a total of 1.5 GB). If you have any applications running in the background, performance will suffer. If any of those applications have “alerts” that pop-up, you will be dead in the water. I wasn’t able to do all of the things I normally do while playing games—such as running Outlook, syncing my iPod, or downloading files.
4) Third person interface bugs
The interface works about 80% of the time. The other 20% can be simply tedious, like having to hit an arrow three or four times before you head in that direction, or fatal, like Det. Goren going into an infinite “disco dance” or trying to walking off in a direction he can’t go. This last bug happened a lot to me at both the Crime Lab and the Major Case HQ. The only way to end it was to save the game, exit the application completely, and reload. Compare to Civilization IV, which is a far more graphically & computationally taxing. Civ IV is much smoother, does not hog memory, minimizes well, and works just fine with background applications.
5) Sound bugs
Often, the voiced-dialog would get in infinite loops. I would have to hit the spacebar to get past it, but the spacebar ends the conversation—often leaving me without vital information.
6) Game play issues
I’m actually not sure if this is a bug or not, but there is a “reveal map” arrow that I hit while in one case. I didn’t know what happened until I started going places and got information that was out of order or just plain didn’t make sense. I even solved a case several steps of ahead of when I should have been able to. Last, there is a point in the game where you have to navigate through a maze-like area. This was a tedious enough task, but having to do it *again* for what seems like a minor reason is really bad. If I hadn’t used Legacy Interactive’s online walkthrough to get back through, I might not have had the patience to finish. There are also a couple of places where game play is sub-par. In one case, a particular item is not selectable—but checking it again in another case is essential. There’s also a part where, in reality, an item would have always have been present—but it doesn’t become apparent in the game until an unrelated event occurs. All things considered, though, these are relatively minor issues.
Summary
Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a great story—great plot, great characters. The voice-overs by the real actors are fantastic. However, the technical issues are overwhelming. Maybe Legacy Interactive will do this game justice by releasing patches in short-order. I also hope that they do a better job of quality assurance with future games: Mystery & adventure games are an under-served genre and I would like to see more of them published.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as its predecessors, November 5, 2005
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Law & Order: Criminal Intent (CD-ROM)
After three increasingly well-written and designed games, Law & Order: Criminal Intent is a depressing letdown. The stories are less compelling, the graphics less convincing, and they've done away with the courtroom side altogether. Much of the crime-solving comes down to pixel-hunting -- slowly and painfully sweeping every molecule of a scene until you find a hotspot that reveals some invisible clue. Maddening! and unsatisfying, since it means you can't solve the crimes by deduction, only by tripping over the evidence.
The acting too is erratic. Most of the no-name actors are pretty good, but D'Onofrio seems to have gone through the whole thing either hungover or really disgusted that he has to do this kind of thing. There's no point in hiring the TV actors to do the voices if they can't be bothered to give it their all, guys.
Added to that, the program itself is buggy and has a slapdash air. On my 3-month-old machine, it crashed, crashed, crashed, until I was saving every five minutes and cursing the air blue.
After the professional and engaging previous entries in this series, this one is a disappointing mistake. Let's hope they either give it up and go on to something else or take the time to do it right next time.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
WASTE OF MONEY!!!, November 10, 2005
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Law & Order: Criminal Intent (CD-ROM)
I was so excited when I found out that they were coming out with Law & Order Criminal Intent but it turned out to be a BIG dissapointment. After installing the game and watching the beginning scene the game just stopped working after that. The entire screen was black and all I saw were the characters. I know I have the latest version of Direct X because all of my Sims games require it but that didn't matter the game still refused to work properly. Save your money and buy yourself something thats actually worth it!
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