FREE GAMES REVIEW: CSI: Hidden Crimes
Ubisoft releases something truly criminal
Ubisoft are responsible for some thoroughly excellent, though slightly flawed, games. Assassin’s Creed is an fantastic first-person-stabber that sees you leaping from dome to dome in a Renaissance city while ambushing guards from dung heaps. The flaw? Slightly pointless time travel sub-plot and some dodgy sequels. Or take the Far Cry series: excellent sandbox shooters on savage islands riddled with wild beasts and mercenaries. The flaw? Crappy story.
Ubisoft are excellent at putting together something fun. Not so excellent at the reasoning behind it all. It’s like coming home to find Arnold Schwarzenegger with his penis in a bowl of coleslaw. It’s quite an experience, but you’re not sure how credible it’s going to sound in the retelling.
So when I downloaded the free CSI: Hidden Crime, I was quite pleased when the Ubisoft logo popped up on load. “What flawed diamond have I found here?” I thought. Well, the good news is that one of the characters is basically Ted Danson. You know. Off Three Men and a Horrific Crime Scene? The bad news is everything else.
Let’s be fair right away. This is a Hidden Object Game. If you like jabbing your finger at a screen until you’ve purposely or accidentally pressed all the correct areas of the screen to a timer, then you’ll love Hidden Object Games. If, like me, you hate the morning ritual of throwing all your clean clothes on to the bedroom floor in the desperate daily search for keys and wallet 10 minutes after you should have left the house, you’ll hate it.
Hidden Object Games are monstrous and anyone who enjoys them should be forced to sort all the world’s sand in granular size order. Unless you’ve been clinically traumatised by one tour too many in Vietnam (and I don’t mean in a life-affirming backpacking way either) there’s no earthly reason you should find Hidden Object Games enjoyable. None.
“Ah, but Ed” the average 14 people who read this far (according to my Medium stats) might say, “what about the crime lab bit? That sounds more interesting.”
Well, it’s not.
After prodding randomly at the crime scene, you then prod randomly at the criminal lab scenes until you’ve made your case. Yes, sometimes you may have to actually choose between two possible suspects, but frankly a caffeinated hen with a little patience could complete this game just by pecking at the phone screen. Any illusion of strategy or skill is thus immediately stripped away. Like watching Steven Seagal defeat opponent after opponent in Vladimir Putin’s birthday akido tournament.
Even after you complete the tutorial mission and get your first case sans training wheels, it soon becomes clear what this game is about. In the tutorial, analysing evidence for clues is an instantaneous process, but thereafter every action suddenly takes a minimum of 20 minutes to complete. Or, if you’re so minded, you could purchase the necessary stars or dollars required to complete each action. And therein lies the rip off.
While many free games are only free for a while, CSI: Hidden Crimes skips the whole facade of free content by asking you to pony up points almost immediately. There’s nothing hidden about this particular crime. Of course, you could earn these points by sharing things on Facebook or watching ads or selling an organ, but frankly you could get actually free fun by popping bubble wrap or badmouthing a colleague behind their back.
Meanwhile Ted Danson keeps himself busy by making tasteless jokes at the expense of the victims. “Looks like she’s drowned in a swimming pool. Stupid whore” isn’t exactly what he says, but is very much the substance.
Come on Ted. Why are you doing this? You must have saved some of your “Three Men And A…” dollars. It was the early 90s. You could have made a killing snapping up bargain-basement Manhattan retail estate via evicting poor families, like business genius Donald Trump. Then maybe you could have been president.
Unless, Ted did make a killing.
If it turns out, at the end of the game, that Ted Danson was the murderer all along, this might actually be a five star outing, and I’ll be the first to admit my mistake. Unfortunately, I’ll never know. If I want to spend all day poking away at a screen in a frustrating, ultimately fruitless fashion, I’ll use Tinder.
Perhaps fans of the CSI series may enjoy this games on association alone. It’s obviously reasonably slick — the graphics are far better than anything you might expect from a free game. But then, it isn’t free. Like when Ted Danson inexplicably turns up at your accountant friend’s 40th birthday party, quibbles about his appearance fee and leaves with his pockets bulging with all the best flavours of Kettle Chips.
For shame Ted Danson! For shame.
