It's tough to get involved in a movie when the actors clearly don't care about their roles. In a video game, particularly an adventure game where there can be such a heavy focus on story and character, it's just as difficult to try to engage the content when some of the voice actors sound like they recorded their lines after a week-long bender.
City Interactive's Art of Murder: FBI Confidential is a traditional third-person point-and-click adventure game. You play as Nicole Bonnet, a young agent in New York City trying to solve a string of violent murder cases. Her general behavior loosely mimics what we assume to be detective work, at least as it's presented in serialized television police dramas. She hunts around crime scenes for clues, brings them back to the station for testing, and then uses what she finds to go hunt for more clues or inform her boss she needs to travel somewhere. It's all very Law & Order, or CSI, or whatever.ince it's a traditional adventure game, it shouldn't be a surprise that solving a lot of the puzzles involves scanning across the screen with your cursor, trying to find things that can be picked up or examined. It's also possible to just have the game highlight all the things that can be interacted with, so if you're not a fan of pixel hunting, Art of Murder's got you covered.
The game makes things easy for you by stripping out non-essential inventory items when you transition between settings, so you're not left sitting there trying to combine Q-tips from early on the game with a jar cap from later on. Nicole will also chirp up when you try to leave an area before finishing everything, saying there's still something to be done, which means you're not left to wander between large numbers of locations, keeping the puzzle-solving focused on small areas.As a result, the puzzles are pretty easy. Only a handful involve any kind of deductive reasoning; most are either trial and error or simply a matter of making sure you've picked everything up and tried to combine it in your inventory. So while you won't be clawing your hair out as a result of some kind of alternate-universe logical reasoning, you won't really be presented with much of a challenge.
And that shifts the focus to the story and characters... unfortunately.
There are so many things in this game that come off as inauthentic. First off, Bonnet's FBI office consists of five people: a secretary, her boss, an investigator named Nick who somehow manages to keep his job despite never answering phone calls or showing up to work on time, and some guy who's killed right at the game's beginning, in addition to Bonnet. The game tries to explain the bare-bones office space and staffing, saying the building is under renovation, but it doesn't really come off as plausible
MINIMUM PC REQUIREMENTS
Windows 98 SE/ME/2000/XP(SP2)
MINIMUM
Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon 1GHz Processor
256MB RAM
1GB Hard Disk Space
DirectX 8.1
32MB Nvidia GeForce/ATI Radeon Video Card
DirectX 8.1 Compatible Sound Card
4X DVD-ROM Drive
RECOMMENDED
Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon 1.5GHz Processor
512MB RAM
1GB Hard Disk Space
DirectX 8.1
32MB Nvidia GeForce/ATI Radeon Video Card
DirectX 8.1 Compatible Sound Card
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