While you start out by investigating a dead alligator on the golf course, it soon becomes apparent that there's more at stake. Someone's missing, and the members are being less that forthcoming about what they know.

Unfortunately, the cases are very linear. There's no room for deviation or independent investigation. There's no movement - you don't walk around. You can visit different areas of each location by clicking when the arrow appears, but each area is static. If you are able to visit an area, it means there must be some evidence to collect. That evidence may be very hard to find, and it might not make sense at first, but basically there are no dead ends.

This became very clear when questioning the witnesses and suspects. I expected that there needed to be some thought put into the order of the questions asked. It stands to reason that a person's not going to be very cooperative if you barge in and start asking pointed questions. But what I found is that it didn't matter at all what I asked, or when. Questioning can only progress up to a certain point with a given set of evidence. Once more evidence is uncovered, more questions can be asked, and so on. And forget about skating by on a search warrant or an interrogation - you better have each and every piece of evidence lined up, like some sort of invisible checklist.

As you visit more scenes and build your case, you have more chances to find evidence. Depending on the difficulty level you choose, you could have a smart cursor that will alert you to the presence of evidence, or you could forego the handholding and search for it yourself. Either way, I found myself mindlessly scanning each scene with the mouse. Pick the wrong tool to collect your evidence, like tweezers for a fingerprint, and your partner helpfully tells you that you made a mistake.

The key in building a good case is in being meticulous with examining every piece of evidence thoroughly. Despite the novelty of analyzing my own lab samples and fingerprints, this step quickly grew tedious. The problem is that you have to compare fingerprints, DNA, and other evidence multiple times before the game would acknowledge that you had established a match. I expected that if I compared fingerprint A to the database and found a match, I could then compare fingerprint B to fingerprint A, and be able to confirm a match as well. But that's not how it works. You still have to search the FBI database for fingerprint B to establish the match. Instead of using my brain to work out the ramifications of matching evidence, I could just keep checking prints against each other and the database and eventually my partner would tell me that I'd made some link that was vital to the case.

This problem highlights what I consider to be a larger problem in the area of procedural dramas and the computer games that they spawn. Real forensic work is boring and repetitious to the average person - that's why TV shows tends to gloss over the details and make it look glamorous and exciting. But when it comes time to make a game out of that show, the designers make the mistake of thinking that the audience really wants to do the actual detective work - not the heated questioning in the interrogation room, but the matching of fibers under a microscope. And that's where the game breaks down. It's just not a fun thing to do.

The scenery was blurry on my computer even with a good video card, and changing the video settings did not make a difference. The best graphics were the computer and microscope and computer shots. There were also cut scenes to show the relationship between the evidence and the body's anatomy. Those scenes felt a bit forced, like they were just included to make the game feel more like the show. They also bogged down my computer a bit, making the sound stutter a few times, which made it easy to predict when the next one was going to start.

Sound wise, the show's actors and actresses mostly did the voiceovers, including David Caruso as Horatio Crane, but they don't say very much at all. There just wasn't a lot of sound to the game since there wasn't much action.

CSI:Miami was a letdown for me, but as mentioned before I am not a fan of the show. I was really disappointed that it was such a point and click game and didn't require any real brainpower to solve. If you're a fan of CSI and want to play a game that has the same look and feel, then you might enjoy yourself more than I did.