CSI: New York

Since the Phoenix Wright games haven't proved to be much cop on mobile phone, there's still a spiky lawyer sized gap on the format for a worthy murder mystery game. The CSI games are among the first that spring to mind as having had a pretty good stab at the genre so far though, with both CSI: Miami and CSI: Las Vegas.

And now here's a new instalment to the series. New York might not be vastly different to the games that have gone before it, but it does give you a new murder to solve and new characters to interact with, which is going to be enough to keep the average CSI fan or wannabe detective happy.

The game begins with a downtown crime scene. A young model has apparently jumped to her death from the window of her 42nd floor apartment, and detectives Mac Taylor and Stella Bonasera aren't convinced it was suicide. Cue lots of poking around looking at blood splatters and fingerprints then taking all this gathered evidence to the lab for analysis.

Investigating each crime scene is done in a typical point-and-click adventure fashion. You use your keypad or joystick to move a cursor around the area, which shows up any objects of interest. Clicking '5' then lets you examine whatever you have highlighted.

Sometimes this will throw up an immediate piece of evidence, but you also have a range of tools to use, such as a fingerprinting kit, Luminol to show up dodgy stains, a camera, and tweezers to pluck up little pieces of evidence.

To begin with, the game holds your hand, lavishing hints on you. It's also very linear. You can't leave most crime scenes until you've found everything, so completing them is just a case of selecting everything until you find what the game wants you to.

It's not all about picking out clues, though. Once you've got your evidence, you take it to the lab and play through mini-games, which simulate all sorts of complicated sounding equipment, such as the DNA extractor and trajectory simulator.

These games are all nicely done, calling for you to play a spot the difference style game against a clock, for instance, for comparing fingerprints and other evidence, and play a Bust-a-Move style coloured ball-firing game for examining DNA, and later on you get to interrogate suspects too.

In fact, all of CSI: New York is well put together. The game looks very stylish and it presents a well-paced adventure and a story that, once started, you'll be hooked on until you discover the outcome.

Games based on film and TV might not always be much cop, but this proves there's always an exception. The only downsides to CSI are with its linearity and lack of replayability once you've solved the crime. This aside, it's the perfect crime game.