A look at FBI Confidential: Art of Murder - An Inviting Mystery Title For Fans of the Genre

A look at FBI Confidential: Art of Murder - An Inviting Mystery Title For Fans of the Genre
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The Case File

You play as a young investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigations (the FBI) who is charged with the duty of solving a series of grizzly murders that are taking place in the city of New York. How grizzly are these murders that you have to solve? Well, the wealthy of the city are being murdered by a ritualistic serial killer who is using a mystery tool to not only kill the victims but also remove their hearts. While you technically have a partner, he is not of much help to you in this case, so expect to be doing the leg work and putting together the clues on your own. Before the game is over you are going to have to be able to answer the following questions:

1. Other than their wealth, what is it that connects all of victims together and why is the serial killer choosing these people to kill?

2. What is the strange tool that is being used to cut out the hearts of the victims in this case?

3. Why are these murders even being committed in the first place.

4. Why was this case being assigned to such an inexperienced investigator and why are you getting so little help with this case?

The Locations

So, where will this game take you to in order to solve the crime? You can expect that you will be visiting some of the New York high society and even the depths of its seedy underbelly, but this game will also take you to the heart of the Amazon jungle. The quality of your graphic experience at these locations will vary depending on your systems quality, but for the most part you will enjoy the not-quite-realistic locales.

Gameplay (5 out of 5)

The controls of this game are easily to navigate and there is not much of a learning curve involved in playing. You won’t need to be an octopus in order to use the keyboard, but the mouse is best. When you look at a crime scene you will see a botton menu with your tools. The tools below are pretty mundane (tweezers, evidence bag, cotton swabs). How you use them is where you can get creative. If you fail to collect the needed evidence in any given area the game will try to guide you to it. Since this title follows the story line tightly there is little in the way of AI in the game, but you won’t feel like you are lacking.

Final Thoughts

Overall, while you may find the dialogue of the game to be a little bit wooden but since the plot moves at a fair pace you won’t be too annoyed by those minor details when an odd corny line comes your way. As a matter of fact you can get a good laugh at some of them if you have an ironic sense of humor that is.

All in all if you enjoy playing games with a mystery bent then you will enjoy this game but if you don’t really enjoy the genre then by all means stay away. This game is too steeped in the trapping of the genre to be enjoyable if you don’t.

System requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

DirectX 9.0

Pentium III 500 MHz

128 MB RAM

DirectX 8.1 compatible video card with 32 MB RAM

DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card

1 GB free hard drive space

DVD-ROM drive

Screen Shots

Images from Big FIsh Games