On the rare occasions the designers chose to subvert the format or put a non-standard challenge in place, like creatively using a miniature golf course to uncover evidence, you’ll feel a little surge of joy. In fact, with so many suspicious items typically in plain view, you’ll wonder why the CSIs need to acquire all the warrants that act as an overused device for pacing each episode. At one point, the repetitive warrant process requires you to revisit the car of a suspect three separate times — a suspect just taken into custody for leading the police on a high speed pursuit after a brutal murder. For glamorous fictional detectives, these CSIs seem bound to a worrying extent by red tape. No one expects slavish accuracy in such romanticised depictions of forensics, but some grip on reality would be nice.

When the complexity of the game has been upped, even slightly, it’s a blessing. Take the jigsaw-style task of putting pieces of a torn photo together; now that pieces can be flipped and rotated it starts to feel less like busy-work and more like a challenge, although still hardly a difficult one. The fingerprint matching task has also been slightly upgraded, as now partial prints can be overlayed by placing them in four “quadrants” of a full print. It’s not quite overlaying it yourself, rotating it and resizing it to match print to print (all of which are, of course, not just the same whorls and ridges, but identical down to the last pixel), but it is getting there. A similar situation occurs with the video analysis tools. Selecting the crucial frame in a sequence for some mystical “computer enhancement” process that reveals new details is all well and good, but unless the player is expected to highlight the precise area of interest (just like in the show) there’s no reason why a little trial and error can’t solve the puzzle just as fast.

This refusal to take a leap into something more ambitious is what holds Hard Evidence back, and the CSI series in general. All the advanced press release talk about new techniques and tools is very much marketing speak for having little evolution in the core gameplay. You’ll mostly notice just some slight and hardly necessary streamlining. There are, as usual, ways of making the game superficially harder; but this is done mainly by removing useful features like evidence tagging without introducing any more depth.

Having said all that, these criticisms make the game sound a good deal less entertaining than it actually is. Firstly, it’s refreshing to play an adventure in real-time 3D, even if it relies on fixed camera positions and very little interaction. Just being able to rotate around areas to spot clues makes finding them more fun than looking for pixels on a pre-rendered background. Then there’s the writing. Each of the cases is a good old-fashioned mystery with lots of twists and turns to uncover as you slowly unpick the story. They do feel a tad lazier than Telltale’s debut though: identical siblings, a lesbian couple and a blind woman are used as blatant ways to add a unique element to cases, the latter providing some of the more tasteless of the aforementioned quips from the cast. Thankfully, such quibbles are the exception rather than the rule, and the voice acting lives up to the quality of the writing for most characters.

Despite some clever location and model re-use, each of the five incidents forms a satisfying standalone case. There is, however, an absence of anything as knowing or as playful as 3 Dimensions of Murder’s case set at an in-joke-laden gaming trade show. The ending case, furthermore, doesn’t cleverly incorporate the four previous cases, just one, and as a result feels a little less impressive than it should. There’s also some very odd product placement; there is nothing objectionable (and in fact it rather adds to the authenticity of the world) about characters driving real cars or using real PDAs, but quite why a major credit card company wants adverts boasting about its security features on a burnt-out taxi cab or on the billboard next to a run-down alley is perhaps the biggest mystery of all.

The CSI games have become better in recent outings, but ultimately this title feels a lot like treading water, and in some respects, a small regression from the last game. With few new additions, increasingly dated graphics, and gameplay still in dire need of a little more substance, you’ll likely be entertained by the latest CSI, but not enthralled. Making the game easy and simple to play is understandable, as it's designed to appeal to fans of the show, not gamers. But it’s quite possible to have simplicity and depth, and the latter is once again missing in Hard Evidence. There's some effortless enjoyment to be found here, then, but until Ubisoft (or their CBS overlords) is prepared to take a few creative risks with the franchise, players will continue to feel as if they’re watching the CSIs, not being one.

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