Reviewed: May 4, 2006
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
Adventure Company
Developer
Artematica
Released: March 21, 2006
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen
2
3
2
2
2.3
System Requirements
Recommended System
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Crime Stories is an adventure game that follows Martin Mystere on his adventures investigating the murder of Professor Eulemberg. The Adventure Company and Artematica have released or re-released this adventure game that follows the adventures of the Italian comic book hero Martin Mystere.
This game was simply repackaged as Crime Stories in the U.S.; the original was Martin Mystere that released in Europe in July, 2005. You can even get the walkthrough from the original and it is exactly the same for this game, and you probably will want the walk through to get through the game that much faster.
Crime Stories is an adventure game that tries very hard to entertain the player and falls far short. Imagine a story that goes something like this; you get a call from the police and they need your help to investigate a murder. You need to get there in a hurry to start your investigation but your wife has taken the key to your clothes wardrobe and your car is in the shop. You need to solve several puzzles just to get out of the house to start the investigation but it doesn’t end there.
This nonsense happens all the time in Crime Stories. Another example of just how bad this is, starting at the crime scene you find that you forgot your police ID and have to go home to get it. It’s in the trousers in your wash and you need to get the washing machine open. Your basement flooded and the washer door is gunked up so you need to find a cleaner to get it open.
Later on you find yourself in South America and doing further investigations of the crime but the Professor you meet there insists you show him some ID as well. You need to fly back home and get another ID that you of course left at home.
This constant search for objects that you left behind or doing very dumb adventure puzzles that have nothing to do with the crime or solving it is rampant in Crime Stories and makes this game terrible.
If the character of the story is such a good investigator that the police need his help why is he constantly forgetting important things at home like his ID’s. Many times throughout the game you have to put up with this nonsense for no apparent reason other than to waste time.
I am not really fond of adventure games, but I do know when a game is bad. The game was not very entertaining and it seemed like the story was too short to keep someone interested so they added a bunch of other puzzles to add to the gameplay to make it last longer. Most of the puzzles you need to figure out have nothing to do with the crime and does not add at all to the story.
Crime Stories uses the simple point and click puzzle solving that is standard fare for adventure games. When your cursor changes as you move it about scenes you click on the spot and have to figure out what to do with whatever it is.
Sometimes you talk to other characters and other times you find objects or clues to a puzzle. You often take an object and have to use it in another scene to complete puzzles but often these puzzles have very little to do with solving the murder.
About the only redeeming part of Crime Stories were some of the still scenes you see are not that bad. The characters walking around look like someone playing with a marionette. While characters walk around they are very jerky and walk like someone is pulling strings attached to their limbs. The cut scenes are not that remarkable and some are fuzzy for whatever reason.
The screens for your inventory and other parts of the graphics were either average or worse. Some of the scenes have some very bad objects like the lemur or donkey but then other scenes have some passable views like the architectural dig in South America. The graphics were passable but could have easily been better.
The sound in Crime Stories was another area that was a disappointment. The dialogue between people is often so bad you can’t wait to get done talking to them. You find out very few clues from talking with other characters and many times they use pauses like “um” and “er” that seem like the creators just wanted to waste more time. It seemed like they tried to make the talk going on realistic but they just accentuated the bad parts and left the rest alone.
In this area of the game the creators still did not come out ahead and should have spent more time with these things to make a complete game that people would enjoy. I believe this was a translation problem due to the fact that this game first came out in Europe and was probably in other languages but it was just annoying for me. There was some music and background sounds but they were just as easily shut off so you could listen to the radio.
If you do play Crime Stories to the end it will take about six to eight hours. That is if you read all the agonizing dialogue and try to follow along with the story, what little there is. I could not get past the feeling that they rushed this game out with so little story for some reason and added in the extra stuff like forgetting your ID’s just to add to the gameplay.
It would not be very hard to come up with some things that would add to the adventure part of the game and still be a part of the story. Instead they have added things that have nothing to do with the crime or the story other than you have to do it to continue on.
I was very surprised to find out Crime Stories was just a re-release of a game with a new name and different box. I’m not sure of the whole story behind this but you can find the games original stuff under the name Martin Mystere. I found quite easily the walk through for it and that was a big help to get through many of the senseless things they added in.
I would not recommend this game even if you are a very die hard adventure fan as it is does not follow any kind of logical path for solving a mystery nor tells a very good story.