As a detective within Chicheng Police Department in China, you are put in charge of solving the cases that are put in front of you, with the first one being a murder case. But instead of driving around the area, you solve the cases by accessing evidence through a specially developed computer system, which will provide you with all the data you need to proceed with the investigation.
For example, you are given the description of the case or murder scene, and based on the information you can type into your search system a word that could provide you with more details about evidence or a suspect. When you move this evidence to your main window, the data can be expanded by the testimonies of the suspects or some additional source of information. You can also access external systems, f.e. in companies or institutions and check if they have data on the suspects you have or the evidence that you have found.
Overall, the idea is quite similar to other games of the genre - you follow the leads, find new evidence, at the end, have to present your case to the justice system, where you will explain what happened, why and who the killer was. However, the whole game is played on a single screen, which limits the options you have. This would not be a problem if CaseCracker actually had a full tutorial or context help within the interface. Instead, you are put in front of a case and even when you know what you want to do (f.e. search apartment of a suspect), you are not really sure how to do it. Or you wanna follow-up on new information, but it is not that clear how you can do it.
Also, at several points the interface will not allow you to just click on a person or car registration to get additional information, instead you need to type the name or the number into a specific field of a search option. What is more, when you search f.e. hospital database, you need to select a very specific date you want to check on, which is inconvenient to say the least, and it is definitely not how databases work. What is more, the search systems are clunky, sometimes you have to put the name of the object in a very specific way to even get the answer.
CaseCracker is a not bad game, but the shortcomings of the interface make the cases far more challenging than it should - instead of helping you solve the case, you are given a faulty tool to operate with and have to rely on your memory or writing things down to keep the track of the evidence. For the price, it is a decent piece of detective entertainment, but with a better interface, it would not be as frustrating as it is.
Can you solve a case like this?
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