What is it about the hour-long crime procedural that makes viewers all over America - and the world, for that matter - tune in time and again? Just look at how many different flavors of Law and Order we’ve been subjected to over the last couple decades. We’re up to how many different CSI variations now? And that’s to say nothing of Cold Case, The Mentalist, The Closer, and Hawaii Five-O the kind of shows that pull in ridiculous ratings in prime-time, and are truly evergreen in syndication. I’m at a loss to explain it.
But from the moment the opening credits hit, bam. You’re in. Buckle up, grab a caffeinated drink, and Wait. This is a video game? What? by Xbox 360? I was wondering why everyone looked a little uh uncanny-valley-is. Indeed, this is Ubisoft’s new NCIS game for all the major consoles, because when you’ve got a license to adapt the hottest hour of naval crime busting on television, you want to make sure to hit all the platforms. The game plays out as a series of four episodes, starring well, digital representations and sound-alike’s of the cast. There’s a reason those credits didn’t give the actors’ names.
Anyway. These stories put you in control of the various members of the team, as you collect evidence, interview witnesses, perform autopsies, conduct various forensic tests, and I suppose you could call this hacking.Alright. So the game play itself boils down to some distressingly easy motions, simple matching games, and wandering all over crime scenes looking for that last bullet hole you missed before. The most intense the game gets are the deduction board segments, where you combine the discrete pieces of evidence in order to come to an understanding of the murders, and interrogation sequences, which combine QuickTime witness-pressing with Phoenix Wright-style contradiction by making you call out the suspects lies. That’s pretty much it. Graphically, the game is about as middle-of-the-road as it gets. On the one hand, everyone’s recognizable on the other, man does their lips and teeth look weird. That’s wherein usually get hung up. Lips and teeth. And you wonder why I prefer anime? The stories you play through were actually written with input from the series’ main writing stable, so they’ve got the twists, turns, and interconnections you’d come to expect from an hour of quality television. The vocal work, however alright, here’s my main beef.
The sound-alike’s doe passable job, and if you’re not familiar with the show itself, you’d pay it no mind. But the trained ear can tell that Gibbs sounds nothing like Gibbs, it takes Siva an episode and a half to tell the difference between Brooklyn Jewish and Israeli Jewish, and Ducky is actually voiced by David McCallum, star of stage and screen, - and along with Robert Wagner as DiNozzo Sir, the only voices from the actual TV show to grace the video game with their presence - turning in what might be the best line reading in video games in the past 20 years. Everything he says sounds natural, in-character, and well, frankly, sets the bar too high for the rest of the cast to reach.
It’s unfortunate that the whole performance is marred most grievously by the excellence of one particular member. The whole experience is going to run you maybe six hours, not much longer than if you sat down and watched four episodes of the show itself. But that’d mean you miss out on the game’s dirty little secret: the fact that one play-through, from start to finish, yields all 1000 achievement points. That’s right; this may be the easiest thousand points in existence. I expect the PS3 trophies work much the same way, while the Wii gamers out there well, too bad so sad. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go curl up on the couch and watch 18 back-to-back episodes of CSI, on any of the fifteen channels that offer such a line-up.
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