Title: Law & Order: Dead on the money
Genre: Adventure

Follow leads. Organise your case. Build your case. Try your case in court. Send your case to prison. Your case’s evil will never again haunt the world of good, innocent, decent, law-abiding people. Following in the wake of CSI’s PC spin-off, the long running cops and docks show, Law & Order, has given birth to its own illegitimate spawn. It’s not clear why now, all of a sudden, long-running American series are being developed as PC games, but it can only mark some sign of a foreboding evil…

I should have seen the signs. The blood running down the walls ought to have been enough of a clue. I’ve been a fool. Sorry, I don’t know how to say this… Um, Cryo are reborn.

The Adventure Company appear to have performed some form of despicable ritual, and summoned the soul of the deceased beast, unleashing its demon children upon the world again. It’s like a really cool movie or something, except with crap games.

Astonishingly, this is a fixed point, Myst-like, hope-n-click adventure! Who woulda thunk it? And even more astonishingly, it’s almost entirely unplayable. Accompanied by a few major characters from the TV series, you must investigate a murder, a woman dead in the park, and follow the myriad clues to discover whodunnit. However, every location is a painstaking pixel-scrape, as you desperately hope to drag the mouse over the (often invisible) object that you must find if the story is to lumber its way onwards.

The process for sending items to the lab is vital to progress, but horribly laboured and poorly executed, and the chances of your playing enough to get to the court section of the game is rather remote. Hopeless dirge.