I suppose being a CSI agent isn’t really a childhood occupational fantasy. There seems to be little fun in gathering stray hairs, DNA samples and the other microscopic minutiae associated with the job. But it seems quite an exciting profession nevertheless, as the TV show of the same name would testify.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is the licensed game of the series. A point and click adventurer. Each mission starts you off at a crime scene, and you have to use the number of methods at your disposal to figure out whodunit. Let’s run you through a standard mission.

Your first task is to search for clues. Woo. As well as using your own two trained peepers, you have additional observationary tools in the shape of a magnifying glass and some weird ultraviolet light. You can also dust for fingerprints, and pour out insalubrious looking potions to highlight bloodstains, as well as using various other little odds and ends to gather a nice little pile of clues. Then you have to collect all the fingerprints, hair samples, wood chips and suspicious dust molecules that you deem to be evidence, and send them to the lab.

Next step, you can trundle off to the morgue and converse with the ominously towering figure of Al Robbins, the guy who cuts up all the victims to find out what’s wrong. He’ll give you a complete rundown of how the victim died, including plenty of superfluous gory details to make you feel good about being alive. He’ll chuck a few clues and bits of evidence at you sometimes as well.

Then you’re off to the Crime Lab to exchange pleasantries with the ever-enthusiastic Greg Sanders. Greg analyses the evidence you bring him, and gives you all the information you ever needed to know, and more, about any samples or objects. His office also contains a computer that you can use to run fingerprint or tyre matches, as well as scanning various other information through. And of course you have access to the ubiquitous lab microscope under which to admire the trim of your victim’s hair.

Once you’ve got all that done, you can pop off to the office of Captain Jim Brass. He can use his high-ranking computer to get hold of any information you need from wherever you like across the world. Plus, he is also the only person authorised to dish out warrants for searches and arrests, so better get used to grovelling in front of him.

So that’s the procedure. You need to make effective use of the above departments to make your evidence meaningful, and thus open up more avenues of exploration. You get to work with a different member of the CSI team in each of the missions, who will give their advice regularly, and will be available for more help should you get stuck.

The biggest problem with the game is that everything is too pre-scripted. You can only ever pick up or examine what the game wants you to. It will let you inspect and run tests on all the mission-critical bits of evidence, but forbids even a close look at the other bits of the environment that you really want to explore. This forces you to solve the crime in the way the game creators wanted you to, leaving little room for individuality.

Even the process of deduction is taken away from you, as your fluctuating mission partners verbally fill out the story the very second it starts piecing itself together. This leaves you with few actions other than fruitlessly clicking every single pixel on the screen in order to find all the clues, and conversing with your accomplices while they solve the crime.

There are five missions in total, each of which are admittedly moderately satisfying to complete, but which are so short that I completed the whole game in under half a day, and that’s without any kind of walkthrough or guide. There is slight replay incentive by receiving bonus artwork for what efficiency percentage you got in each mission. You can replay them all to boost your scores if you so wish, but really there is little genuine motivation for doing so. You’d just get bored.

The in-game characters are all based on real-life individuals from the TV show. Their likenesses are all quite convincing, and it must be noted that the voice acting is excellent overall. The graphics are generally very good, except in the spinaround investigative view, where the images are slightly fuzzy and the perspective is distorted.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is not wonderfully likable, it’s just not particularly unlikable either. It chooses the middle road of mediocrity, and treads it with care. You could do worse than invest in this game, but you could certainly do better.

Adam Shirley