Production values on CSI: Miami are about par for a Click Wheel iPod game: there’s legitimate music, real character and background artwork, plus video cutscenes that nearly make up for the highly limited animation throughout the actual gameplay. The simple fact that they’re in an iPod game-sadly, without any sort of pre-purchase parental advisory-makes CSI: Miami just titillating enough to keep you wondering what’s going to happen next.
The formula wouldn’t have worked well at all but for the presence of a few themes that help keep people interested in the show: strippers, drugs, and the high-rolling Miami lifestyle, complete with exotic cars and yachts. Gameloft had the difficult choice to make between creating a detective game that really required thought and presented the player with lots of options, or crafting something that followed the same formula as the TV show: an investigation that gets a little larger and apparently open-ended before it neatly resolves.
Mini-games to extract DNA, match up samples, and break into safes are all but mindless, and we didn’t make a single mistake during any part of the story the only delay in the whole game was choosing which piece of increasingly numerous, similar evidence to present to suspects to get them to talk. You find bodies, drugs, blood stains, and scraps of glass or fabric, and the game all but tells you directly which tools to use to search them. It’s the word “linear” that explains CSI: Miami’s ultimate lack of appeal as a video game-to say that it has “twists and turns” might be a little generous in the plural department. When a dead woman’s body washes up on the beach, you use a magnifying glass to look for clues as to how she died, then proceed to do the same on a second victim, search a bunch of buildings and vehicles, crack safes, and match DNA evidence.
Using a point-and-click interface that transforms the Click Wheel into a trackpad with a single action button, the game basically walks you through the steps of an investigation spanning four “chapters,” three suspects, and a collection of locations that are easy to navigate while looking for and analyzing evidence.
You play as Lieutenant Horatio Caine, whose likeliness is taken directly from the sunglass-snapping David Caruso, along with the faces of other CSI cast members.
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