CSI: Crime Scene Investigation review (Xbox)

The glitches don't start and stop with gameplay either, as there are a bevy of graphical hang-ups in the game, again, mainly with the first five missions. Characters will jarringly shift from one animation to another, bugging out badly in the process. Background pieces will show horribly obvious seams and texture breaks, and in a couple of cases, we actually saw the scene literally break before our eyes. What we mean is that parts of the scenery actually wouldn't line up with other parts, mainly in areas where characters were standing, which resulted in what basically looked like a patch of broken glass. The Dark Motives sections don't seem to be totally devoid of issues either, as we did notice some of the animation problems there too. However, overall, it looks like the later portions of the game had better luck in the porting process than the original game did.

It's a shame too, because the Dark Motives portions of the game don't look too bad. While the characters don't move around a ton, they're nicely rendered and look very much like the real-life characters on the show. Even the minor players, like the suspects and victims, are equally well rendered. The first five missions, however, are a different story. The models are far lower in resolution, lack much of the detail the Dark Motives models had, and generally, those sections of the game just don't look good at all. You'd think maybe, just maybe, the developer could have cleaned up the first game's graphics a smidgen rather than going for the schizophrenic graphical approach. Then again, considering how obviously rushed everything else in the game is, maybe not.

The audio is perhaps the one shining star the game has to offer, as the entire CSI cast, including William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Paul Guilfoyle, and Jorja Fox, all reprise their roles here. Petersen is a little on the dead side in his line-reading (and not just in his typical style either), and more than a few of the game's side characters deliver their lines in a ham-fisted way. However, a lot of the cast members make up for this shortcoming with some fairly impressive work. The music in the game is also very good, though it's likely much of it was just taken directly from the show's musical score. Unfortunately, like with the rest of the game, there are some technical issues here, although they're far less horrible than the graphical problems. Mainly, a couple of sections of the game simply lose dialogue in the middle of a cutscene, and we noticed more than a few minor audio skips at somewhat inopportune times. Also, the music occasionally seems to overlap, causing a sort of echoey effect. Once again, these issues reek of a quick and dirty development process.

On multiple levels, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fails miserably. The cold, hard fact remains that neither of the games featured on this disc were really very good in their original form on the PC, so the fact that you're effectively buying a cheap, semibroken port of two games that weren't especially appealing from the get-go simply doesn't fly. If you love CSI so much that you absolutely have to play this, just go buy Dark Motives for the PC. Sure, it's only half the content, but it's the only half that's any good to begin with, and considering how reasonable that game's technical requirements are, nobody with a computer should have any trouble playing it. Compare that to an Xbox version of the same game that's significantly more broken and the choice ought to be crystal clear.