Are you a fan of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation? Do you enjoy mystery games? This is definitely a fun game that draws you in and keeps you interested.

Much like the game Law & Order, in CSI you get to interact with the real characters from the show, with their voices and attitudes and everything. A show's writer put the game together, and you can tell by the pacing and dialogue.

You really get the feeling that you're watching the famous TV show and participating in solving the case. The first mission is a tutorial, to help you learn the ropes and how all of the screens work. They are well laid out, with your collection and detection tools nicely labelled and your case file always at hand.

You can easily gather up whatever you find interesting and bring it back to the lab to analyze and do computer searches on. The plots have twists and turns, and eventually if you are diligent you track down the guilty suspect. The graphics aren't stellar, but they're good enough to make the scenes believable.

Yes, this is not a game that will take 80 hours to finish, like Final Fantasy. You can probably play through a mission a night even if you only have an hour or two for each one. The object isn't to "race to the end", though. It's to go through the scene, think like a investigator, think about what you're doing. Who could it be? What might their motive be? The game is on the cheap side compared to most other games out there so I considered it quite worth the money. Plus, this is the kind of game that you can lend out to your friends and see who enjoys which missions the best. It's a great "evening relaxing fun" game that will keep you going for a week or so. And with the series only being an hour an episode, to have the same activity in the game take 8 hours would probably be a bit much :)

Hopefully now that the game engine is built, they'll come out with more missions for CSI fans to enjoy. It would be neat if they offered different "levels" of missions - some for new gamers, and some for advanced puzzle solvers. We'll see!

CSI Crime Scene Investigation walkthrough

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