Detective: Scene Crime Review by our Guest Albie

The following review for Detective: Scene Crime, is a guest review by the very awesome Albie from the completexbox discord. At Complete Xbox, we always welcome your views, and we love to share and promote them within the wider gaming community.

D.O.A

Ok, so my first impressions from the games’ title was: Playing as Detective Yoda, we are, hmm? But after viewing the trailer, my hopes were raised substantially. Curse you, trailer maker…

You begin the game as a nameless police detective, doing what detectives do… Detect. You are offered a choice of 5 crime scenes with difficulty assessments next to them… And that’s it. That’s as much world building as you’re going to get. No story, no cut-scenes, no exposition… Just a screen with ‘Level Select’ and ‘Options’ to choose from.

Controls

From the very get-go, I had my concerns. Playing on Xbox Series X, the menu screen gives you a mouse cursor to move around, except that it’s very imprecise. So, I navigate to the ‘Options/Controls’ tab, to adjust the sensitivity. Nope. The only option is to invert the axis. Guess I’m stuck with a cursor that’s going to keep sliding past what I want to click on, then.

This riles me more further into the game, as there are documents which require you to scroll down the page – A simple use of the right thumb stuck, you say? You’d be wrong. No, you have to rely on Captain Cursor for that as well. Having fun yet?

The options page also lists what buttons you’ll need when playing, and the list is short: The first item shown is ‘Run’, and in hindsight, perhaps I should have taken this advice. Other controls are: Use, PDA, Zoom, Menu and Inspect Object. Comprehensive stuff.

Graphics and Sound

Not gonna pull any punches: The sound design is terrible. Some really odd musical choices (in my opinion, at least), and there’s not much sound beyond that at all. You either glide silently across the floor, or it sounds like you’re wearing a pair of lead-lined clogs. As far as I can recall, that was it for sound effects. The graphics are just about functional. Lots of low-res textures, plenty of re-used assets. It doesn’t look great, but if the game is good enough, that really is a secondary concern. Please read on…

Gameplay

Since this was my first time playing (and therefore, didn’t know what was ahead of me) I decided to load a crime scene shown as Easy difficulty, namely ‘The Hospital’.

This is where EVERYTHING began to fall apart.

I’m in a hospital ward. There are three empty beds. Yup, this a (quotation fingers) “Scene Crime”. And there’s nothing. I was expecting perhaps a dead body, someone to interrogate, a coroners report… Nothing. A whole bunch of stuff you can pick up and turn around which has no bearing on the case whatsoever, literally just there to waste your time. So, I take out my PDA, which gives me some, but not much, context: One person has died.

So, without any body to investigate, or anybody (arf) to interrogate, we literally DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO DIED! I kid you not, we have to work out who was occupying each bed, and which of them has died. Now, I’m no expert, but… Surely we could find this out by finding the two that are still living? Anyway, that aside… We have to work out who was in each bed. But we don’t know which bed the victim died in either?!? From this spectacular lack of any real evidence, we have to determine who died, and who the killer was. Wow. Glad I chose ‘Easy’, I think to myself.

Truth is though, this IS easy, though not in a way you’d expect a detective game to be. Because, in order to solve these “crimes”, you have to go onto your PDA and answer a handful of questions which each have a drop-down list of possible answers. Ok, you still have to get them right, but the game doesn’t penalise you in ANY way for choosing incorrectly. You can just get it wrong, and change your answer! Now, being a purist, I managed to restrain myself from doing this, but having completed the entire game in under 90 minutes, I could probably have halved that time by doing so. I want a refund on those sad, wasted minutes of my life which I’ll never get back.

I’d like to illustrate further exactly how brainless this ‘mystery’ is. On one of the patients records, it states that they have a mild allergy to penicillin. No mention of any allergies for the other two, so it would stand to reason that this was the victim, and their doctor/nurse was the killer, right? Wrong. This isn’t even the patient that died. And once you work out which patient was actually the victim, and who killed them, there is absolutely no elaboration on how they did it, or even why. Case closed, I guess.

To be fair, this first mystery did offer up the only highlight of my play-though: There is a laptop on a table which contains the details of two nurses from this ward (guess they’re not big on data protection?), which shows one as being aged 4 years and 3 months, and the other 1 month and 17 days. This gave me a good laugh. I guess they just hire them young these days?

The Second Case

So, I can be optimistic when the fit takes me. “Tis but a warm-up!”, I tell myself. “I’ve seen the trailer, and there’s definitely more to the game than that!” So, I move on to the level ‘Subway’. We’re now on a tube train, there’s a broken wine bottle and an ambiguous red puddle, which could be blood… Or just red wine. Red footprints lead down the car, but there’s no body (again). I can’t leave this train car, so what do we have around us? There’s a train ticket stub with the name “Ioan Quero” on it, another with no name, and a broken mobile phone with “Izan” scratched onto the back. With just two names to work from (one of which was only a partial name), no witnesses, no CCTV or access to any DNA testing, I have to work out who was the aggressor, whose blood is on the floor, and how many people were involved. Ridiculous. It’s like whoever made this game watched an episode of Columbo, but fell asleep five minutes in.

This isn’t a detective game. It’s a game of pure speculation. This is a blind man on a park bench attempting to solve a Rubik’s Cube. I’m not even kidding. I streamed my play-through of this game, and on the final mission, I simply went through the lists of names on the PDA, and completed it with trial and error faster than I could have probably completed it by moving from the spot where the game spawned me. I mean, on the previous levels where I’d tried to play properly, looking for clues and the like, It was still mostly guesswork as to who did what to whom. And at the end of every investigation, you get given an assessment score – But since you can only complete it one way, It’s always going to be an A+, sooo… Where’s the point?

Overall

To think, I made a space on my Xbox’s “Favourites” group for this game. I even made a text document on my laptop so that, when I was streaming it, I could quickly copy and paste the game title and search tags into Twitch, since I would inevitably be playing this game avidly for the next couple of weeks.

But sadly, this game has no intrigue, no world building, no soul… It’s just uninspired, lazy game making. I’m genuinely worried now that the time I’ve spent in this game is on a permanent record somewhere. Detective: Scene Crime is so shallow that even an ant wouldn’t require a floatation device. Avoid, avoid, avoid.