CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Hard Evidence is the work of the good people at Telltale Games, creators of CSI 3: Dimensions of Murder and Sam and Max Episode 1 and 2 among others. I have to admit I never played any previous CSI game but I wasn't fully satisfied with the present one. Let's talk a bit about the game in general. CSI: Hard Evidence is set in the city of Las Vegas, staring the same actors from the TV Show with the same name. The location of Las Vegas was chosen because after the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Las Vegas crime lab is the second most active in entire United States.
But let's talk about the game now. You start as a freshman detective and as a tutorial you must find the person responsible for a donut missing from the back seat of your boss's car. When all the basics are learned you get to the real deal where you have to complete all the 5 missions of the game. In each case you will have a partner, starting from Nick Stokes, Catherine Willows to the big boss, Gil Grissom. These partners have the role to help up when you get stuck, the total number of clues affecting your final evaluation.
In the first mission, you have to solve the case of a murdered taxi driver, burned alive in his own cab. You will also have to solve an attack on a pregnant woman in her own house, "an accidental" death of a rock band, the death of a surgeon, his wife being the only witness; and a shootout where a store clerk gets killed.
Every time you have to search the crime scene for all the evidence for you to advance with the story. Evidence can be found in different sizes, shapes and materials, from fingerprints, blood, chemical substances to visual evidence such as photos, video footage or information encrypted into suspect's computer. Every shred of evidence can then be analyzed at your mobile lab or at the headquarters and can be compared with the local database or the FBI's for a match. At the morgue, the coroner provides valuable information about the deceased, information decisive in your investigation.
The suspects you investigate will give out clues on what to do next, who you must talk to, or who to arrest. The suspects are always as innocent as they look so don't make presumptions on who is guilty and who isn't. I guess they're all innocent until proven guilty. Along the way, you will find bugs that you must collect or search every corner for toughness points (points awarded for searching everywhere for clues).
If you need a warrant or you want to bring a suspect to interrogation, James Brass, the Homicide Captain will provide you with everything if you can bring solid evidence to his desk.
Conclusion
Overall, the game is too short and the difficulty of the 5 missions is a walk in the park. The game is meant to be a relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon thinking if you're going to buy or not a new HP product (every piece of electronics in the game has the HP brand on it).
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Gameplay: 65
Except for the thrill of solving murders, the game brings nothing new and even if it has a replayability feature, you won't get as much as you give. The game is very short, made for kids perhaps, for the way that everything is so simple and it's impossible to get stuck and put your brain to it. It doesn't represent a challenge and when you finish the 5th mission you won't get an outro movie, just the usual final evaluation of the case.
Graphics: 63
I have to admit that Sam and Max looks better. The characters are not that detailed, polygonal like and messy textures are thrown on objects. It doesn't look that great even on higher resolutions.
Sound: 73
A soft detective music plays in the back and the ambient sounds makes you feel you're there. The voice acting is mediocre, nothing really to impress.
Multiplayer: N/A
Hardware: 66
Although it runs smoothly on an AMD 64 X2 5200+ processor with 1 Gigs of RAM and Nvidia 8600GT and has decent loading times (3-4 seconds); when tested on a P4 3.0 Ghz processor with 2 gigs of RAM and ATI X800 PRO the game freezes, up to 10 seconds for loading and another 30 when quitting the game.
System Requirements:
Processor: 2 GHz processor or better (3GHz Pentium Pentium 4 or equivalent recommended)
RAM: 512MB (1GB recommended)
Video Card: 64 MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (see supported list)
