Paying homage to old school point-and-click adventure titles, CSI: NY – The Game attempts to give gamers a chance to solve hard-hitting crimes from the popular detective show on their own. While this is fine and dandy, the problem is that the developers forgot to make the game intriguing enough to keep gamers interested outside of the first episode.

Playing as two of the central characters from the hit CBS show, gamers have the chance to take Mac Taylor and Stella Bonasera through a series of mysterious deaths as they unravel before your eyes. There are several other reoccurring characters showing their faces within the game from the show, but sharing likeness isn’t enough to save the game from mediocrity.

The gameplay is based around interrogating and questioning individuals that pertain to the case on hand. Through conversations with these eye-witnesses or suspects, you’ll ask a series of questions that’ll open up more conversation options. After a few minutes of discussion, you’ll run out of dialogue options and have to move on to new clues. The dialogue trees are overly simplistic and aren’t nearly as interesting as they are in the television show. In all honesty, I wish the interrogation process borrowed a few things from BioWare’s role-playing game, Mass Effect, when it comes to conversations. Instead of having a diverse and remarkable communications with NPCs, CSI: NY – The Game employs unpleasant exchanges between the characters that come off as robotic.

Outside of interrogating suspects, gamers interact with repetitive mini-games that ask them to extract fingerprints off of evidence, trace outlines around blood stains, and various other typical puzzles. These mini-games often occur in the laboratory after retrieving evidence from the crime scene. If you’re not performing mini-games or speaking to NPCs, then maybe joining in on fetch quests to obtain objects pertinent to the crimes is you’re type of thing.

There are four episodes to play through that all start out with a death of a victim and thus sending our two main characters off on a wild goose chase to figure out who committed the murder. While there are a few prime suspects that’ll have you confused on which one could’ve done it, by the time of the end of the episode – which all end in the interrogation room with the killer confessing his crime – you should have a clue on who done it. The personal favorite was the murder of a girl who was killed while she was filming her video blog; it was current and was an interesting scenario that I haven’t seen in any crime-detective shows lately.

Gamers turned off by adventure games with high difficulty will be glad to hear that CSI: NY – The Game is easy for the most part. If you ever get lost on what to do, the game employs a hint feature to allow gamers to click on to figure out the next step in solving the crime. The hints will easily send you in the right direction but if you ever find yourself stuck on a puzzle, each of the game’s episodes allows you to skip any two puzzles of your choosing.

Instead of using 3D graphics and walking around environments to pick up items to solve crimes, players will point-and-click their way through CSI: NY –The Game until the bitter end. Sure, the graphics aren’t the norm – they’re static and somewhat cartoon like – but the menus lack any depth to them. It’s not an attractive game in today’s landscape of adventure games, so don’t expect any type award worthy graphics. On the other hand the voice work is a little more accomplished thanks to actors from the show lending their voices. Still, the actors didn’t put forth their best work and often sound bored when reading their lines.

The major problem with CSI: NY – The Game is that it doesn’t encourage gamers that try to rush through the story to keep playing. In the majority, adventure games as such, promote gamers to click all over the crime scenes to find evidence and push forward with the title. Well, gamers will be punished if they go hog-wild with clicking all over the place as the cursor will disappear and you’ll be left scratching your head what to do. It’ll reappear a few seconds later, but those few seconds are frustrating no matter what.

By the time you finish solving all the crimes, you’ll most likely be bored stiff of the puzzles and won’t ever pick up the title again. The developers are promising a fifth episode through download content later on in the year, but there’s no real reason to join back in the process after you complete the four short episodes already included.

Gameplay: 5.5
A monotonous game in almost every avenue, the game is linear with no deviations from the storyline to solve the crimes.

Graphics: 5.0
The graphics won’t wow you, but at least they recreated the actors faithfully.

Sound: 6.0
Having both actors providing their voice likenesses is great, but they aren’t at their best in terms of performance.

Difficulty: Easy

Concept: 6.1
Forcing the games to follow the procedures in a specific order to solve the crimes is very droning. There’s not much freedom to solve the crimes, but if you enjoy classic point-and-click adventures, CSI: NY – The Game offers an all right experience.

Overall: 5.3
While it’s an entertaining romp for the first hour or so, the game will tire quickly on the player. The show is much more exciting than the video game so it’s best to stick to watching CSI on your television rather than playing it on your PC.