Unsolved Crimes: Just the Facts
Company: Empire Interactive
Unsolved Crimes exposes the gritty underbelly of 1970's New York in a crime-drama game that will mix point-and-click adventure gaming, with brain-training sequences and twitch-based action events for what we hope to be a truly unique experience. In Unsolved Crimes, you will take the role of a rookie who is being taught the ropes and throughout the game, you will help solve nine different crimes. While the first couple will feel very much like a tutorial and help you get your gumshoes wet, you will soon uncover the overarcing story that will lead to a much bigger mystery. Most of the game involves exploring a full 3D world looking for clues and gathering evidence around crime scenes. One scene might have you examining a dead body, while another crime involves a kidnapping. But this game isn't just adventure style inventory gathering and puzzle-solving. As you explore the crime scenes, you will uncover oddities that will help solve the crime, when this occurs; you will go into a mini-game, similar to your standard DS brain-training games, to determine exactly what the clue means.
Meanwhile, other times, you will go into "Crime Quizzes" where you will have to deduce the significance of a clue. For instance, if you are examining a body and discover some broken glass, your partner will approach you and ask you why the glass is unusual. Answering these quizzes earns you points, and the information you gain from them helps you correctly determine exactly who the perp is. But if you haven't gathered everything you need to know in order to deduce who the culprit is, don't worry; the game appears to be pretty forgiving and allows you to go back to the crime scene until you've gathered everything you will need to know. In addition, other puzzles like piecing together a memo or paying attention to a cut scene and answering questions about it will be other types of puzzles the game will throw at you. One of the interesting aspects of this game comes when it is time for you to determine who committed the crime. You start with a roster of suspects, and the game asks you questions. Things like "What was the time of death?" You give your answer, and the game asks you who that eliminates. Provided you've read up on your suspects and have done the necessary legwork to verify their alibis, you should be able to eliminate some as suspects. As you learn more facts about the case, more suspects will be taken off the list, until eventually you will have one remaining guy (hopefully, if not, then you need to go back over your evidence).
In order to offer a bit of a break from the deductive parts of the game, Unsolved Crimes will also feature some twitch-based action sequences between levels. While not a lot of detail was given about this aspect of the game, the developers assured us that they wanted to make sure all of the different types of gameplay made sense where they were and fit nicely together, so we should probably expect some interesting sequences to come out of this game. In discussing a DS game that tries to mix point-and-click adventure and action genres, it is pretty inevitable for it to be compared to Insecticide, and the fact that that game didn't do as well as the developers had hoped. Well, the creators of Unsolved Crimes said that one of the ways they hope their game is better is the setting. Instead of being in a world of insects, you play through a Hill Street Blues scenario which has a lot more realism. Unsolved Crimes will start walking its beat September 23rd with a Teen ESRB rating for $29.99.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Related Links: Our Review of Insecticide on the Nintendo DS
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