Review by: Brandon "Tweezers" Cackowski-Schnell

Crime Scene is a game designed to fill a void that certainly exists, namely that of the DS hosted M rated crime drama, but in trying to fill that void, the designers focused on providing the wrong experience. Sure the game is M rated, although mostly for blood on dead bodies and little else and there is certainly no dearth of crime scenes but it's completely lacking in drama to the point where you probably won't stick around to see how all of the crimes come together in the end.

You play as Matt Simmons, a wet behind the ears crime scene tech in the police department of some anonymous European city. The first case you land is what appears to be a murder suicide involving one of your department's most decorated inspectors. From there it's all downhill into a morass of cases involving a botched hostage negotiation, some drug dealing and a van full of burned bodies that you so respectfully describe as smelling like roast pork. Apparently you missed out on the police academy's sensitivity training class.

To go about collecting all of your grisly clues you're outfitted with a wide variety of tools from cotton swabs used to collect fluid samples to fancy pants DNA sequence analyzers. All of the tools require one form of touch control or another and they range from working fairly well to providing a level of frustration that may lead you to your very own crime scene. Certain tools such as the scalpel or the tweezers require you to perform motions in specific ways and the game seems to track where the tip of the onscreen implement is, rather than where you're actually touching with the stylus making for some frustrating moments of continued tweezing. To make matters worse, every mistake takes off of your competence bar, for lack of a better word, with a full depletion of said bar resulting in your firing. It's one thing to botch your analysis due to your own failings but when the game makes some arbitrary decision as to whether or not your piece of fingerprint sticky tape is big enough, well that's frustration of another color.

Given the name of the game, it's no surprise that the bulk of your time is spent utilizing your various forensic toys. You will spend a lot of time analyzing evidence, some times coming away from one crime scene with a dozen pieces of evidence that all have to be analyzed with the same tools you've had since the game started. If the game is supposed to show the mountainous backlog of unprocessed evidence in most chronically underfunded police departments, then I say good show. If it's supposed to provide a tedium free gaming experience well, better luck next time. I wouldn't expect a new tool or forensic method with every case but at the same time, going through the same motions of swabbing, analyzing with the microscope and then searching matching DNA samples for three or four fluid samples at a time becomes a chore.

When you're not hunkered over a microscope or fingerprint database you'll be interrogating suspects and talking to your superiors to get arrest and search warrants. Getting warrants involves putting together a case file of all of the evidence you've found in order to bolster your specific theory. At these points the game falls into the same trap that most adventure games fall into, with you having multiple pieces of evidence that can support your claim but the game only accepting specific pieces. To its credit, the game is relying on cold, hard evidence rather than asking you to point out some logical fallacy based on a snippet of conversation so putting the files together is easier in that regard, but at the same time there are times when a file requires eight pieces and some times when the file requires only four and the game never tells you how many pieces it wants to see. Oh, and if you provide too much evidence, yeah that's bad too.

You'll come across a variety of suspects and unsavory individuals as you search for answers and you'll engage them all in bouts of stilted dialog and goofy cop cliches. As all of the five cases end up being intertwined you'll have the repeated joy of talking to the same people over and over again. The game is wrapped up in a satisfying manner with literally every loose end tied up in a shiny bow. Unfortunately there's never a sense of drama or urgency to the cases, even when dealing with a kidnapping in the final case. You'll bounce from scene to scene, taking all the time in the world to get whatever evidence you need paying no mind to the fact that multiple killers are on the loose.

While it's true that this specific genre, namely the mature, police adventure genre is underrepresented on the DS there are plenty of other more worthwhile adventure games that focus on investigating crimes such as the excellent Hotel Dusk: Room 215 or the long standing Phoenix Wright series. Sure there may not be as much blood or as many opportunities to swab a saliva drenched toothbrush but at least those games are fun and interesting, two qualities missing from this particular crime scene.