Having never played one of previous incarnations of the CSI series and being the acheivement whore that I am.  I decided to take CSI Deadly Intent for a spin.  It doesn’t take long to determine that you probably should spend your time more wisely somewhere else if you are looking for a fun time.  CSI Deadly Intent, takes most of the “detective work” out of the game by hand holding  for most of the cases.   Elementary grade puzzles, generic graphics, and laughably bad controls make CSI more of an excerise in tolerance more so than reasoning.

The core CSI gameplay is built around a point and click interface where you will you interact with environments by searching for clues, to one of the 5 cases that the game presents to you.  In this point and click interface you scan environments for evidence by dusting for fingerprints, spraying chemicals, collecting residues, among others.  These tired and repetitive methods of data collection, make the game boring very quickly. CSI Deadly Intent’s only form of controller interaction is that of an onscreen cursor much like a mouse arrow. The problem with it, is that it moves entirely too erattically and you will find yourself continuosly moving the controller back and forth to make the cursor navigate to an item that you can see plain as day.  How you can fuck up include these type of design flaws when this is the only interaction that you have with the player is beyond me.  It makes absolutely no sense that the one control feature in the game is so flawed.  This not being the first installment in the series on the console, the CSI team needs to investigate a new programmer for the controls.  Where the game may actually be tolerable if you could get past the spotty graphics, and puzzles designed to challenge even the smartest three year olds.

In a last gen current gen mashup the graphics for CSI hard evidence are as a whole pretty bad.  The character faces are good, but the bodies suck.  With little movement or onscreen activity you would think that the graphics could be photorealistic at this stage of the life in the Xbox 360.  Many of todays games that are considered to be great or good even, take into consideration the small details which bring the game to life.  In a game that tries to emmulate the realisms of murder with red splatterings and at times very graphic depictions of murder, something gets lost in the translation when the graphics are this piss poor.  Using the same poor modeling for the game cut screens which play out possible theories on how the crime was comitted, CSI Deadly Intent fails at this also. With so little actual content in the game itself, a lone bright point is that CSI has little to no loading times when navigating through different menus and locations throughout your investigation.  Thank god for that.

If you like solving puzzles and putting the noodle to work CSI will make you feel like a wiz kid, through carefully disguised hand holding, CSI will basically quide you through the entire game.  For the most part the only times you should get stuck is when a control glitch prohibts you from finding a piece of evidence.  The core puzzles are played out through analyzing evidence in the crime lab.  Matching samples, comparing evidence, and examining peices of evidence  is engaging the first time around, but there is only so much of it you can do before it becomes tedious and repetitive. Perhaps this is why there are only 5 missions on the disk.  I approximate my game to have taken me 5 hours, while eating lunch, among other things.

Being a game that is relatively easy and be completed in a short amount of time, with no multiplayer element,  CSI Deadly Intent should appeal strongly to those who would like to wrangle up 800-1000 acheivment points in a very short amount of time.  If you could care less about the points, I would avoid the game at all costs.

The Good

Easy Acheivement Points

The Bad

Everything Else