CSI: Miami Review

5.5

Format PC

Developer Unknown

Publisher Ubisoft

Genre Action, Adventure

Sifting through a pile of puke with a pair of tweezers and then analysing the hair found therein by means of microscopy is not, under normal circumstances, the stuff of an enthralling game. But when you're emulating TV's favourite forensic whodunit, what other choice have you got?

CSI: Miami is a show where a bunch of struggling actors solve crimes across South Florida with a mixture of old-fashioned detective work and new-fangled forensics. Which initially leads to some interesting gaming. There's no action, and instead you visit locations to talk to suspects and gather evidence. Notice a suspicious looking substance on the corpse's trousers? Take a swab. Looking for fingerprints? Spray some Ninhydrin around the place.

With your evidence safely zip-locked it's off to the morgue or labs for analysis, and once you've got what you need and the 'evidence trinity' of suspect, victim and location is complete, you swoop in for the arrest. Full marks for doing something different, but it doesn't hang together as an enthralling game experience.

Interrogations are simply a matter of exhausting the supplied question options, and every shred of evidence has to be correctly inspected using the appropriate piece of equipment to find the next clue. It's like a survival horror game stripped
of everything bar the cut-scenes and puzzles. Locations are bland and static - click on something to look at it, click on someone to talk to them. The whole thing's about as free-roaming as a man in a straightjacket locked in a padded cell, and about as fast moving as a glacier.

PC Zone Staff