Hollywood Files: Deadly Intrigues (Nintendo DS) Review

Players take on the role of Zoey, a private investigator who runs a detective agency in Hollywood. In Hollywood Files: Deadly Intrigues, Zoey is working on a new case, the death of Peter, a famous actor involved in a freak car accident. Was it murder? Clues and the unravelling of various mysteries are the only way to get to the bottom of matters and find out if client Robert Danson is in fact the culprit behind the heinous crime.

The story of Hollywood Files: Deadly Intrigues flows through the use of comic book panels with minimalistic visuals that work well during the interludes as portraits and hand-drawn scenes appear on the touch-screen and the text bubbles pop up on the top screen, but then in the main game there is a tendency to mix in real life characters into the rendered backgrounds. Whilst this worked sufficiently well in the PC edition, the graphics have merely been condensed and squeezed into the DS, and as a result some of the locales are quite difficult to clearly view, making item locating really tough at times, especially when trying to uncover smaller objects.

There are thirty levels to work through in total, ten per chapter, and the comic book approach is quite a pleasing one that, as mentioned, works nicely in keeping the pace of the story development swift enough to maintain interest. The issue with the visuals is not a disastrous one, and finding objects is possible with an extra level of scrutiny that is not required in other examples, such as the superb Murder in Venice and Vampire Moon: Mystery of the Hidden Sun. As for the range of items to be found, on the one hand Hollywood Files delivers a wide amount of variety, yet on the other it leads to some extremely odd additions, like underpants, sometimes arising.

Each stage is a race against the clock, although the limit is usually more than sufficient to locate all items. There is a penalty for randomly tapping too much, which prevents the game from being too easy, and rather than being a mere points fine, deducting from the running total, every tap becomes a red cross and does not count for a short time. Areas are scrolled around via the D-pad or touch-screen, whilst tapping the stylus on the appropriate item removes it from the list found on the top screen. Not all objects can be discovered, though, with them having to appear on the list beforehand, since only a few items are listed at first, with more appearing once others have been found. With certain key pieces of equipment being used to solve clues later in the adventure, and a handful of mini-games to break the main objective up, Hollywood Files: Deadly Intrigues manages to serve up the usual staple features, yet never quite lifts itself above the crowd enough to make it an essential purchase for fans.