James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D (Nintendo 3DS) Review

James Noir’s Hollyword Crimes 3D is Ubisoft’s attempt at carving out an audience hungry for brain teasers on the Nintendo 3DS a year before Level-5’s fifth Professor Layton release hits Europe. However, with the backwards compatibility of the 3DS, it means that the superb duo of Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Call, and V5 Play’s homage to Layton, May’s Mysteries: The Secret of Dragonville can both be thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish even on the new portable hardware. Therefore, if James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D was to ever stand out from the crowd, it certainly had to bring a spectacular amount of ‘wow’ with it. Unfortunately, despite looking promising from an early hands-on last year, this sleuthing puzzler, with a tinge of murder mystery, fails to ignite in the expected manner, barely moving past fizzling point.

Players take on the role of a contestant on a hit TV programme from 1961, The Incredible Puzzle Masters Show, which focuses on members of the general public testing their wits against all manner of riddles. After only the first round, though, an FBI agent who used to be a close friend requests your help with solving puzzles left behind by a serial killer. Unfortunately, as the story unfolds, all signs start pointing towards you actually being the culprit, with the old ‘friend’ believing that you are responsible for the slaughter of the show’s past champions.

The majority of James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D proceeds to play out in the form of the quiz show, with each round consisting of twelve different puzzles, not all of which need to be overcome to progress since each one has a specific score attached to it. When last week’s contestant’s score has been matched or surpassed, the round is over and there is a brief intermission whilst the murder scenario kicks back in. Sadly the over-the-top cheese of the game show, whilst done in an intentional way to mimic the time period, is really spoilt by the shockingly poor aesthetics. Hollywood Crimes tries the same approach as CiNG and Koei Tecmo’s AGAIN on DS, with real actors and actresses superimposed onto in-game graphics, but the animation is awful, with no lip-syncing and only a few set frames of motion-capture present, resulting in jerky movements throughout. Those who played the Tex Murphy detective adventures on PC will know the style well enough, but even those ancient games looked better than this on the whole.

It is not helped by both the shortage of scripted lines and the way they are poorly delivered, leading to cringe-worthy moments that can sometimes thankfully be skipped using the X button, yet rear their head again and again due to the resultant repetition that comes from the same scenes using the exact same lines.

In terms of the quality of puzzles included, James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D is a mixed bag. Although there are some highly engaging efforts, such as using the gyroscope to slide boxes around a maze, locating specific patterns in the midst of many coloured blocks, and rotating 3D objects around to uncover hidden messages, there are others that are mere trial-and-error, giving the player no real sense of achievement upon completion. The other key issue stems from the fact that even though there are over 140 puzzles included, nowhere near that many are required to complete the story mode, and there is no incentive to return and complete the rest that are available via the menu screen due to far too many puzzles being exactly the same. Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Call dodged this bullet expertly, with only a handful of re-skinned older offerings being found, but sadly that is not the case with Hollywood Crimes.

Finally, with the majority barely making any use of the unique 3DS features, including the actual 3D used in the game’s very own title, there are moments where it looks extremely apparent that this was a late-in-the-day Nintendo DS product that got re-fitted to justify launching on Nintendo 3DS instead. The story is merely passable, there is no real ‘action’ for the player to become involved in, nor any mysteries to solve, the visuals are weaker than expected and there are far too many puzzles repeated throughout. However, during the short ride to the credits, the work of puzzle veterans Oscar van Deventer, Andrea Gilbert, James Stephens, Tom Jolly, and the Grabarchuk family proves moderately entertaining, and the story does peak towards the closing stages. James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D is definitely not a total lost cause, but with May’s Mysteries: The Secret of Dragonville already out and Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Call landing in Europe on the exact same day as this, there are far better alternatives.