One of the side effects that has arisen with the release of both the Nintendo DS and the Apple iPhone is the re-emergence of the long lost adventure game. Not since the heady days of Sierra’s Quest game catalogue have there been so many games released in this genre. That is not to say that the quality is there yet but at least adventure gaming has made a comeback.
CSI Miami is your ubiquitous adventure game based on a hot entertainment property, namely the high ranking series of the same name starring David Caruso. The game, by developer Gameloft, attempts to mimic the structure of a regular episode presenting the player with a crime and the subsequent steps the CSI team undertakes to find and prosecute the perpetrators. Presented in four chapters the player is tasked to collect evidence, process it, analyze the results and interrogate the various suspects.

As the game begins you are immediately thrown right into the story as a corpse is found washed up on a local beach. The CSI team responds and you instantly get your first task of searching the body and surrounding area for evidence. This is done easily by tapping on the screen where you think relevant evidence can be collected. The game holds your hand every step of the way as your associates basically tell you which tools to use to collect different kinds of evidence – swabs for blood stains, tweezers for glass shards, and luminol for invisible to the eye blood stains. There’s really no worry as there is no penalty whatsoever if you pick the wrong tool. Your companion will just complain that they think you have chosen incorrectly and you get the chance to choose again.

The game tries to add some dexterity based mini games but most of these are incredibly rudimentary. Processing DNA at the CSI lab brings up a game not unlike Bust a Move whereby you shoot DNA molecules of a certain colour into a spiralling DNA strand, the object being to hit the same coloured areas. Though it is possible to be a total klutz and miss there again is no penalty for failure as you just try again and again until you pass.

Other mini games include lock picking which is done by using the iPhone’s accelerometer feature and a simple matching diversion where you are asked if two samples are identical. Each time you successfully complete a mini game it is unlocked and you can play these outside of the main game. The problem here is that all the games are not compelling making the free play feature redundant.

The game’s apparent lack of difficulty is somewhat offset by having three difficulty levels that you choose at the beginning but even at the highest setting it’s still incredibly simple. This removal of skill also makes everything degenerate into nothing more than a text based adventure quest. With no way to mess up any part of the investigation you feel like you are doing nothing but reading an average crime novel.

Worse still, there seem to be parts of the game which are clearly not optimized for the iPhone such as the interrogation questions you can ask. These are presented in a scroll list but the issue here is that the arrows you need to scroll up or down through the list are puny on the screen. I found that I kept hitting a conversation choice instead of making the list move. This is incredibly frustrating as you have to keep listening to something you’ve already asked before.

Other signs of lazy programming can be found during the loading screens that pop up as you move between locations or more frequently during the lab where you are constantly swapping out evidence in the numerous devices. These show different characters from the show and a short quotation from them that does not relate to the game in the slightest. Also, there were many times that the game did not cycle through the many loading screens and kept loading the same one over and over again sometimes 3-4 times in a row. I know I have complained about this in many other iPhone games but is it really that hard to have the game not choose the same thing back to back?

As this is your typical movie/TV tie-in offering the production values are excellent throughout including gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds and sound effects galore. However, this does not include the voiceovers which are delivered with no care for nuance and are all presented in dry monotones. None of the characters sound remotely like their TV counterparts, which is no surprise due to the exorbitant costs involved but they sound like they are delivered by Gameloft’s own office clerks. There’s no point including full voiceovers unless you are seriously trying to up your production values and overall game emersion. These atrocious voices should have been left out and the money spent on other areas. You’ll find it much easier to get immersed in the story by just turning them off.

At the end of each chapter you are presented with your reward – a short 10-15 second movie clip taken from the show. Like the dialogue quotes during the loading screens these video segments have absolutely no bearing on the case at hand and are seemingly randomly chosen. It is also superfluous that the only reward the developer could come up with is non-related video that does nothing but bloat the game’s install size to over 200 MB.

Like nearly all games on the iPhone the actual play time from start to finish is dramatically short. CSI Miami should take most gamers, on average, about 2 hours to finish. There’s only one case presented here and unless you are someone with a short memory and forget things easily there’s no replay value whatsoever. Upping the difficulty levels makes the mini-games harder but the core narrative never changes. Without sounding too cliché this makes the game hard to recommend except to the most diehard CSI Miami fan. The narrative itself is nothing special and with only three suspects, none of whom are remotely developed and scant locations available to scour for evidence it feels more like an undercooked half hour episode of the show.

*1/2 out of ****

Developer: Gameloft
Publisher: Gameloft
Released: 11/07/2008
Version: 1.3.0
Size: 251 MB

© 2009 The Galactic Pillow