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Great story & characters … but lots of bugs

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 65 / 68
Date: October 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I’ve been a big fan of Legacy Interactive’s “Law & Order” game series. I was so exited to get “Criminal Intent”, I had the order pending for 6 months with overnight delivery so that I wouldn’t have to wait an extra day to play it. I then was rather disappointed when I tried to play it—the video was messed up to the point of making the game unplayable. But more on the bad stuff later.

The Good Stuff
“Law & Order: Criminal Intent” is an interactive adventure game that takes you into the mind of Detective Goren, the star character on the hit TV show of the same name. The game is a mystery adventure with a strong psychological bent. You examine crime scenes, gather evidence, and ask questions—a lot of questions. Fans of the show will be delighted that the mind games & plot twists are even more prominent in the game. Vincent D’Onofrio and Jamey Sheridan do an excellent job with the voice-overs for their characters. The only possible downside to the presentation is that it is very linear—you are pretty much stuck in a narrative, and there are only a few things that you are able to do out of order.

You don’t have to be a fan of the show to play & enjoy the game, though. If you, like me, enjoy adventure games in general (like Sierra’s classic “King’s Quest”), you’ll find Law & Order: Criminal Intent a good addition to an underserved genre.

If you’ve played previous Law & Order games, you’ll find that Legacy Interactive has refined its technique over time, removing some of the more tedious aspects of the game play. It used to be not-so-obvious whether evidence was critical to the game. In previous games, as a rule you would pick up everything in sight and then have to send it separately to both the lab & to research. This has improved dramatically in this edition. “Send to Lab” and “Send to Research” have been consolidated into “Analyze.” The “Analyze” function will automatically send an item to both the lab & research. “Analyze” is also used for witnesses; every person you analyze will go to both to research & to surveillance.

The number of items that need to be analyzed has also been drastically reduced. In many cases, merely looking at an item without analyzing it is sufficient. The game lets you know this by not giving you the analyze option for these items. That they’ve done so without making the game less challenging is a big kudos to Legacy Interactive. You can still do silly things like analyze incidental characters or the coroner’s report, but in another kudos they’ve actually provided substantial (but irrelevant) responses. No more boilerplate “subject was observed doing nothing interesting”.

Questioning witnesses is a big part of the game. A divergence from the earlier games, rather focusing on what questions to ask, the focus is on how the questions will be asked (Straightforward, Deceptive, Confrontational, Empathetic, or Flattering). Real-life detectives know the importance of elicitation, and this is a fresh and welcome interface in the game. Depending on the difficulty level you choose, you may finding yourself having to let witnesses cool off quite a bit!

Another deviation from previous L&O games is that it is third-person rather than first-person. Although it is kinda cool, and adds some authenticity, I’m not sure as to how much it really added to my gaming experience. Were the interface not so darn buggy, it might have been better… which leads me to:

The Bad Stuff
As a former quality assurance engineer for a software publisher, I’m sympathetic to how difficult it is to assure a game will work on all systems. Every computer is unique, and especially with the variety of graphics cards and iterations of DirectX out there, making sure it works with every combination is nearly impossible. That being said, I’ve installed & played a lot of games (including previous Law & Order games) without any of these issues. I think Legacy Interactive dropped the ball on this one. Maybe once the first software patches are released things will be much better... I sure hope so, because 90% of my Bad Stuff is technical in nature.

1) No graphics bug
The first time I loaded Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the non-interactive video worked, but in the main gameplay, only the characters and items were visible—everything else was black! Downloading new video drivers corrected the problem, but my old drivers were not that old, and I had played numerous other games (including the other three Law & Order Games and ER, all by Legacy Interactive) without any issues.

2) Where’s the online support?
A week after the game had been released, there were still no entries for the game on Legacy Interactive’s support site. When emailing tech support, “Criminal Intent” wasn’t even an option—I had to select a different game to finish the online form! They might have corrected this by the time you are reading this review, but it is still not a good sign that they were behind the times.

3) Does not play well with others
If you minimize it, you are never coming back to it…and, since it takes up 98% of CPU time, you are lucky if you can load Task Manager to shut it down. It hogs memory, taking up over 500 MB on my system out of a total of 1.5 GB). If you have any applications running in the background, performance will suffer. If any of those applications have “alerts” that pop-up, you will be dead in the water. I wasn’t able to do all of the things I normally do while playing games—such as running Outlook, syncing my iPod, or downloading files.

4) Third person interface bugs
The interface works about 80% of the time. The other 20% can be simply tedious, like having to hit an arrow three or four times before you head in that direction, or fatal, like Det. Goren going into an infinite “disco dance” or trying to walking off in a direction he can’t go. This last bug happened a lot to me at both the Crime Lab and the Major Case HQ. The only way to end it was to save the game, exit the application completely, and reload. Compare to Civilization IV, which is a far more graphically & computationally taxing. Civ IV is much smoother, does not hog memory, minimizes well, and works just fine with background applications.

5) Sound bugs
Often, the voiced-dialog would get in infinite loops. I would have to hit the spacebar to get past it, but the spacebar ends the conversation—often leaving me without vital information.

6) Game play issues
I’m actually not sure if this is a bug or not, but there is a “reveal map” arrow that I hit while in one case. I didn’t know what happened until I started going places and got information that was out of order or just plain didn’t make sense. I even solved a case several steps of ahead of when I should have been able to. Last, there is a point in the game where you have to navigate through a maze-like area. This was a tedious enough task, but having to do it *again* for what seems like a minor reason is really bad. If I hadn’t used Legacy Interactive’s online walkthrough to get back through, I might not have had the patience to finish. There are also a couple of places where game play is sub-par. In one case, a particular item is not selectable—but checking it again in another case is essential. There’s also a part where, in reality, an item would have always have been present—but it doesn’t become apparent in the game until an unrelated event occurs. All things considered, though, these are relatively minor issues.

Summary
Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a great story—great plot, great characters. The voice-overs by the real actors are fantastic. However, the technical issues are overwhelming. Maybe Legacy Interactive will do this game justice by releasing patches in short-order. I also hope that they do a better job of quality assurance with future games: Mystery & adventure games are an under-served genre and I would like to see more of them published.

Not as good as its predecessors

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 23 / 24
Date: November 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

After three increasingly well-written and designed games, Law & Order: Criminal Intent is a depressing letdown. The stories are less compelling, the graphics less convincing, and they've done away with the courtroom side altogether. Much of the crime-solving comes down to pixel-hunting -- slowly and painfully sweeping every molecule of a scene until you find a hotspot that reveals some invisible clue. Maddening! and unsatisfying, since it means you can't solve the crimes by deduction, only by tripping over the evidence.

The acting too is erratic. Most of the no-name actors are pretty good, but D'Onofrio seems to have gone through the whole thing either hungover or really disgusted that he has to do this kind of thing. There's no point in hiring the TV actors to do the voices if they can't be bothered to give it their all, guys.

Added to that, the program itself is buggy and has a slapdash air. On my 3-month-old machine, it crashed, crashed, crashed, until I was saving every five minutes and cursing the air blue.

After the professional and engaging previous entries in this series, this one is a disappointing mistake. Let's hope they either give it up and go on to something else or take the time to do it right next time.

WASTE OF MONEY!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: November 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was so excited when I found out that they were coming out with Law & Order Criminal Intent but it turned out to be a BIG dissapointment. After installing the game and watching the beginning scene the game just stopped working after that. The entire screen was black and all I saw were the characters. I know I have the latest version of Direct X because all of my Sims games require it but that didn't matter the game still refused to work properly. Save your money and buy yourself something thats actually worth it!

Review from Gameboomers.com

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: October 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Law & Order: Criminal Intent is produced by Vivendi Universal Games and developed by Legacy Interactive (Executive Producer: Ariella Lehrer, Ph.D. and Producer: Craig Brannon, Ph.D. - hmm - both P.H.D.(s); impressive. The script for this "gem," written by Elizabeth M. Cosin is intense, focused and representative of the series. Twists and turns abound within the storyline. The game's writer, I believe, realized this as the script was taking shape and created one of the most "fan - intrigued" experiences I have enjoyed to date. The inside clues carefully sprinkled throughout the game are strokes of genius, and might easily have been spawned by the delicately balanced mind of Det. Bobby Goren himself.

One of the best features of the Criminal Intent game is that in this adventure we have the genuine pleasure of listening to the voiceovers for Det. Bobby Goren as done by Vincent D'Onofrio himself - absolutely key for this game's success, and for my enjoyment. It is his voice which adds a certain hue, and colors the entire mood of the game.

This is a third person adventure and the gamer takes on the persona of Detective Bobby Goren as he sorts through a number of violent homicide investigations hoping to bring the murderers to justice. The developers have decided to bring Det. Goren's PDA full throttle into the gameworld. It is fully functional, completely portable, and ever-present if you choose -- or quickly appearing out of your virtual pocket without so much as a right click. Here within the PDA we also have a map used for most "location jumping." As we discover the addresses for various locations to explore, they are added here. We also can find a notepad of sorts in the PDA. There is also a personal phone book, cell phone and answering machine which will come in very handy upon occasion.
The next gadget in our intrepid hero's arsenal is the laptop, which for some reason (probably budget concerns of the precinct) is a permanent fixture at Bobby's desk at Major Case. Now, I'm sure that his laptop is just as ordinary as anyone else's, but what is important to note here is the special program that our dear Capt. Deakins has installed on it during the first case investigation. What is it? Well, it's a Criminal Profiler, of course. Here you'll put in various reports, bits of evidence and crime scene photos to help you understand the "criminal mind" so to speak
The last "tool" really isn't a physical device at all, although it is portrayed as one in the game's universe. I like to call it WIS or Witness Interrogation System. This creates some very interesting and psychologically sound examination techniques -- the detectives at Major Case excel at these. Whenever there is a question-and-dialogue session in the game, this handy dandy gadget will appear. It shows subjects or themes with which to question the witnesses on the right and (here come the neat part, folks...) five "Bobby" faces on the left - each with an aspect of the indomitable style for which Det. Goren is famous. We have at the top and descending in counterclockwise order:

* Confrontational - Strong, arrogant and intimidating (especially when it's emanating from a 6'4", 200lb man in a dark suit with a blue shirt and tie.)

* Deceptive - Bobby is a pro at this...(wonder if he is as good at poker???)

* Flattering - Can be very effective in appealing to a subject's vanity, don't you think? (Again, especially when it's emanating from a 6'4", 200lb man in a dark suit with a blue shirt and tie.)

* Straightforward - The calmest and most polite of all of these tactics.

Empathetic - This one really scared me more than any of them, because you just know that this type of questioning is pure manipulation.

There is much to do in this game besides the inevitable sleuthing. There are loads of puzzles and conundrums here. They run the gamut from sliders and inventory-based puzzles to music, color, and chase puzzles to mazes...and there is even a crossword puzzle...lovely. (I'm so glad that Ray Ivey was a consultant for this section...it really shows).

This is a huge game...and not one I feel should be rushed through. Take your time and enjoy the scenery. There is certainly enough of it -- over two hundred different magnificent pre-rendered shots. Some were absolutely breathtaking. Thanks, no doubt, to the inspired art direction by lead artist, Jesus Uriarte. Well done! The facial characteristics were beautiful as well, extremely detailed, although the look of the bodies themselves was slightly blocky -- but I'm not complaining. I absolutely loved the look of the game, especially the "lighting" effects. It made me feel as though I had walked into a real episode of Criminal Intent.

The Foley sounds and ambience, masterfully edited by Abby Schneider North, lent a heightened sense of realism. I was hooked and drawn in to the game within the first ten minutes...this was one that I really didn't want to stop playing. A lot of work went into the ambient sounds here. The incidental music created by Chris Rickwood really grabbed me and made me homesick for the gritty streets of my beloved Manhattan...right down to the "ching - ching." The musical score provides the gamer with a quiet sense of urgency - after all NYC is very fast-paced, as you well know. Wonderful stuff.

The voiceover cast was massive, with many actors doing more than one role, all professionally and admirably done, and with accents sounding quite believable. But I do have to say that Vincent D'Onofrio and Jamey Sheridan took their roles and claimed the day. A most enjoyable experience...I loved every minute.
So, then, was this game utter perfection?

No, but the problems that I encountered had nothing to do with the game per se. They were more of a technical nature, and they have inspired me to issue a warning. Make sure that your system meets the minimum requirements or you will have difficulty running this game -- this engine is very taxing on systems more than two years old. Still, these glitches were minimal and were corrected by a simple save and restart.

Other than that, I would highly recommend this game to one and all. I feel it is one of the best detective games I've played, certainly the best in the Law & Order, Crime Scene Investigation and Cold Case File genre to date.

Grade: A

(Edited for length)

Wish I hadn't spent $30 bucks on it

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I LOVE Law & Order. I watch the show all the time and I have the other 3 games that are currently out. I've played them all. Each generation of games seems to get a little better in regards to the programming and manueverability (I KNOW I spelled that wrong!). This game was a complete disappointment! I experienced almost all the same bugs as some of the other reviewers mentioned.

In fact, when holding all the Law & Order games up in comparision to the CSI games, they are seriously lacking in both enjoyment and graphics. I would recommend all the CSI's to anyone who even remotely liked these Law & Order games. I don't watch the show, but I love the games. Can't wait until they come out with more! I seriously hope the writers and programmers get their heads out of their butts and start creating the games I know they are capable of!!

Too many bugs!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Although I was able to play the first two games in the series without problems, and although I have updated drivers, and my computer meets all of the necessary requirements, I couldn't get past one minute of game play without the game freezing or shutting down. Way too many bugs and no support online. I would avoid this one.

I hade to quit playing....

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was excited about this game coming out because I have played the others and enjoyed them a lot. However, this game had a lot of bugs, jerky movements and crashing....I only solved 2 of the cases and half way through the 3rd one and I stopped playing because of my frustration level.

I guess it will have to sit on a shelf until Legacy figures out how to correct all the "bugs."

Great Premise but Awful Implementation

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: February 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is based on the popular TV show Law & Order - Criminal Intent. You take on the role of Detective Robert Goren tracking down criminals and bringing them to justice.

I love this TV series, and I also have enjoyed previous Law & Order games. I thought this would be a perfect match for me and my interests, and in fact I made plans to do a full walkthrough for the game.

If I hadn't made those plans, I wouldn't have lasted more than 15 minutes in this game. As it is, I still haven't finished my walkthrough because the game is so incredibly frustrating. I'm playing the game on a very robust system that I have played *hundreds* of other games on to write up reviews. It is most definitely not a machine issue here - it is a game issue.

The premise is that you are in essence doing the things in the TV series. This means there is no courthouse scenes, like in Law & Order (the original). In Criminal Intent, the show is all about understanding the criminal mind, figuring out what happened and getting them to confess.

First, character movement is awful. Your character gets stuck on doors, stuck on walls, stuck on other people, and just stands there twitching like a madman. You have to keep moving around until you can get him in the exact right spot to interact with the object you wish. Sometimes he'll randomly throw his arms straight out in a "I can fly!!" movement.

The game crashes. Often. Save every 5 minutes if you don't want to lose your data.

The map menu buttons sometimes become disabled. You lose the ability to scroll up or down. This gets you stuck on half the map area for a while. In addition, there's a strange diagonal-arrow button on the map that, when you press it, reveals hidden areas that you shouldn't know about yet. Since there is no warning that this is some sort of a cheat, it affects your gameplay.

There's a new interrogation mode where instead of choosing specific things to ask, you instead choose a "style of speaking" - for example you can be straightforward, or empathtic, or flattering, or so on. This is nice in theory. In practice it is AWFUL. There are times that you choose empathetic and the character says something REALLY cruel. You just watch it like a train wreck with your mouth wide open. At least, if you screw up, all you have to do is walk away for a few minutes and then return again. The person seems to have completely forgotten how much you upset them. Also, there are times that asking a question makes the person respond in a way that makes no sense. The game sort of expects you to use a certain order and if you happen to choose a different order, the game doesn't account for it. For example, in one situation you ask a question in one way and the person lies. So then you press them on the question saying "why did you lie?" If you choose to just press them in the first place, you still say "why did you lie?" even though the person didn't lie at all.

Certainly there were good intentions here. The graphics are reasonably good. The gameplay theory is good. However, whoever was assigned to program this had SERIOUS problems - and the quality control is pretty much completely missing. This is a game that could have used another 6-10 months in development to work out all of these quite serious issues.

A different L&O, but they keep getting better

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: December 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Bugs aside -- and they are indeed obnoxious at times -- Legacy keeps getting better with each L&O entry.

Maybe it's because I like linear games, and maybe it's because I like pixel hunting, but I think CI's first installment is their best L&O so far.

First thing is, there's more than one crime to solve here. There are four. That's a big plus.

Next is the fact that it's more character based than the previous three. Being third-person (as opposed to first-person) doesn't make much of a difference, if you ask me, but it's refreshing to have the detective actually ask the questions out loud. Listening to the Q&A's in full adds a lot to the experience.

Then there's Vincent D'Onofrio's voicing. To be honest, it's not the TV show. His dynamics are somewhat lacking here. On film, D'Onofrio has much more presence, and his acting is given proper direction. In this game, while he does an adequate job, his tone rarely veers from the calm-toned vocals that have become his trademark. Unfortunately, though, that's not enough. On screen, Vincent exudes plenty of energy, while here, no matter what "angle" of questioning the player chooses, he maintains a somewhat monotone vocal. This is not necessarily a pitfall, mind you, but to enjoy this game's main-character acting, one must either never have seen the show or suspend most of what they've already experienced from it.

A nice new inclusion in this installment that was missing from the previous L&O games is the automation of getting info on suspects and evidence. In Criminal Intent, one no longer needs to send things to each individual department. Suspects being analyzed automatically go to both Research and Surveillance, while collected evidence to bhe analyzed automatically goes to both Research and the Crime Lab. Makes play a lot less tedious.

If you can deal with the bugs that often make this game frustrating to play, then I recommend it (as I do the previous three L&O games). I enjoyed it despite the bugginess, but everyone's got a different threshold for tolerance.

Good game but bugs bugs bugs

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was really looking foward to playing this game because I just love the show and already own the other law and order games. I dont regret buying this game but I really wish Legacy wouldn't have had so many bugs in it. It freezes up at times and I have had to reboot. Goren walks the wrong way other times and then just stays there walking till you reload your saved game. I wish he would have been a little more animated in this game also, as one person said, it sounds like he is bored with the whole thing and really didnt want to voice the game. I would recommend to wait, hopefully, till Legacy comes out with some patches before buying it because of the bugs. Otherwise, if you like the show, you'll like the game, just like I do. I would have given it a higher rating but the bugs really drag it down. Such a shame.

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