Unsolved Crimes

Murderous intent

The developers of Unsolved Crimes don't seem to have much faith in their players: to assume these felonies are going to remain unsolved for very long is a rather lofty conclusion that implies a rather diminutive mental capacity on our part. The truth, however, is that you're far more than likely to keep these cases open out of ambivalence rather than being straight up bamboozled by any ingenious design craftsmanship.

There are all the trappings of a cliché being unwittingly executed here. "I've got cases piling up here like it's the New Jersey turnpike!" barks your sassy and brash African-American boss at the start of the game. Taking a page out of the TV series Life on Mars, we're back in the 1970s - complete with a horrifically cheesy introduction sequence that struggles to reach 'so bad it's good' status but fails - with collars, poor forensic sciences and car chases. There's a sensation of Unsolved Crimes being a game unhinged from time, where even the background music feels like something from the Mega Drive era took a wrong turn and ended up in 2008.

While everything on show is adequate, overall, the presentation is roughly executed with a blend of 2D character sprites on the top-screen and an interactive 3D environment on the bottom. There's an attempt at stylising the characters, but Hotel Dusk or Phoenix Wright this isn't: the washed-out palette and endlessly recycled animations smack of cost cutting moves rather than serious artistic interpretation. The game is doomed to a budget feel from the start, and when you're staring at screen after screen of text that's seriously lacking in any semblance of decent punctuation you start to wonder if this game was doomed to development hell from the beginning.

Appearances aside, what you've basically got inside the package is another entry into the DS's ever-expanding catalogue of adventure games. The player is cast as an unknown, unvoiced rookie cop on their first day in the NYPD homicide department. The meat and potatoes of the game is Marcy Blake, your seasoned personality-devoid partner who serves as the link between the player and the game world. By pressing a few buttons here and there the player is thrust into an increasingly intertwined set of cases - eight of them in total, all of them pretty short - that deliver a not unsatisfying conclusion at the end. Brusque generalisations and damning stereotypes aside, the actual plot of Unsolved Crimes isn't bad. It's not exactly refined and at no point will you ever really develop any attachment to it, but overall there's enough going on for a player to come out of it without feeling short-changed.

The real problem is that the game never seems to be confident in trying to challenge the player. Whenever a serious opportunity at doing something tricky approaches, the developers seem to have taken a massive U-turn and opted for a difficulty setting even a lobotomised PE teacher could solve without fuss. Which results in a confused game, seemingly trying to balance a serious adventure game with mass-market, casual appeal.

Cases are solved around a series of queries pitched by Marcy. You navigate around the crime scene, examine all the evidence and learn what you can so you can give the correct answers. Get it wrong, and you lose a star, run out of stars and you're unceremoniously kicked off the police force. Questions are almost always presented in a multiple choice format, with one of them usually being so stupid it wouldn't be out of place as an answer from a hundred pound Who Wants To Be A Millionaire question. Even if you don't know what's going on, you can blag your way through the proceedings. Examining evidence, too, is rarely more complicated than spinning it around and looking at what's written on the back. It's not rocket science.

Once all the queries are answered and Marcy is happy, you trot back off to the station, give your final report to the boss and the perpetrator gets banged up. Rinse and repeat for about seven hours. When Unsolved Crimes hit its stride I found myself compelled enough to continue, but there are moments where proceedings start to sag and you're left playing out of a respect for the obvious talent that the developers seem to have but refuse to show. There's clearly potential here, but it just hasn't been properly realised in Unsolved Crimes. That's not to say it's a bad game, just that it never manages to propel itself away from desperately unremarkable. It's the kind of game that you'll play to completion then forget instantaneously. Even trying to sum it up is a challenge because there are a few real diamonds in the rough. No matter how much I want to like Unsolved Crimes I can't escape the fact it's simply more chaff than wheat.

The most depressing part of the game, presentation aside, is in the way that it always backs off from its potentially challenging, thought-provoking route and pitches you a rather rudimentary series of multiple-choice answers. When Unsolved Crimes throws you a puzzle that demands use of your brain instead of half-arsedly fumbling your way to victory, it's good. But it's an unavoidable truth that there's better stuff elsewhere, and only the most desperate and least judgemental of adventure gamers would feel satiated after dropping twenty pounds on this.

55%

By Martin Gaston