Art of Murder: FBI Confidential

Quite Boring & Unorginal   December 2, 2008
Art of Murder: FBI Confidential looks intriguing, but fails to entertain as a modern, 3rd person point-and-click game.
The main character's voice acting is horrible, trying to be funny in spots where it more inappropriate and annoying than laughable. She is a wimpy female character with poor detective skills. As the player, I felt I knew more about crime scenes than her. She repeats herself to often, makes incoherent sentences, and states that a bag of drugs is a "very useful thing" and a bronze statue head is "irreplaceable equipment." Um...okaaay.
The plot, involving ritualistic murders and the ancient Incan civilization has been used so many times that I found the story quite boring and uninteresting.
The only points I did like about the game were the nice graphics and sound. Since this game is quite shorter than other games of its genre, that made it easier for me to finish it without giving up on ever finding out what happens to the characters. That being said, the ending was unsatisfying.

I highly recommend a 3rd person game like Still Life or Black Mirror instead of this game. For something less macabre, try The Longest Journey or the Runaway games.

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Very decent game   November 1, 2008
Overall, this game was pretty fun. It was a point and click game, which I like. The game had several different cool scenes to visit, so it had some variety. I also liked that you couldn't leave an area if you hadn't found all of the clues. One thing to keep in mind was that when saving/loading the game it was pretty slow, so just be patient. Good game overall.

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Great game!!!   October 11, 2008
This game was a lot of fun. The puzzles were logical
and not to difficult. I hope they come up with a second one.

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Not much art (2 of 3 Found this Helpful)   October 11, 2008
OK, my first clue that this wasn't going to be a great game was that there is only one loading disk and the whole thing loaded in less than 2 minutes. There is not much detail, the puzzles are pretty easy, and there is not much that can be looked at. The only things that can be examined are the objects that are to be used. This makes deciding what you need to collect to solve a puzzle a "Duh". Navigation is good, and I didn't run into any glitches, just not what I consider a good challenging complex game.

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Wasted Potential (7 of 7 Found this Helpful)   October 6, 2008
"The Art of Murder: FBI Confidential" is a game with plenty of potential, but it never lives up to its promise. You play as Nicole Bonnet, a rookie FBI agent who is assigned to a series of grisly homicides in New York City. It seems like the point-and-click adventure format would be perfect for this kind of investigation, but the game undercuts this at every turn. There are several reports, including blood tests and dental records, but the player is never allowed to actually look at them. There are also chemical tests which involve nothing more than sticking a sample in a test tube and waiting for the answer to magically appear on-screen. Even the dialogue has been simplified; there are no dialogue trees and no choices for what to say to the other characters. This is a detective game that eliminates all the actual detection.

Puzzles range from easy to frustratingly illogical. One puzzle involves combining inventory items to fix a cell phone. Unfortunately, this task can only be performed by placing the items on a teeny-tiny hotspot which suddenly appears on your desk, and there is absolutely nothing to warn players that this is the case. There's also at least one puzzle where you can (and probably will) die, though fortunately the game autosaves before this puzzle.

By far the biggest drawback to this game is Nicole herself. It's very hard to enjoy a game when you dislike the main character, and boy, did I dislike her. To begin with, Nicole is a weakling who runs like an idiot and complains that a ream of paper is too heavy (um, don't FBI agents have to go through training?). Plus, her voice acting is awful. The actress doesn't sound like she even understands her lines half the time. The one line where she shows real feeling, though, is when you try an incorrect combination, and then she sneers, "That was stupid." She says that a lot. Her other go-to phrase is "What would Nick [her partner] do?" and since the game actually goes to elaborate lengths to keep you from meeting Nick, that's a super-annoying question. Frankly, I don't know what Nick would do unless it involves skipping work again, and that doesn't help me solve the puzzle.

As far as the plot goes, it is pretty easy to pick out the murderer, and then it's just a matter of waiting for Nicole to catch up with you. This is a short game (it took me about 8-9 hours), but it felt much longer, mostly because every plot twist is telegraphed far in advance. All in all, this is an uninspired game with a bad actress and a paint-by-numbers plot. You can do better than this game, and you probably should.

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