Game review: James Patterson Women’s Murder Club - Nintendo DS

In most cases when a game based on a popular film comes along you know it’s going to be less than fantastic.

It seems the same rule can now also be applied to book tie-ins, at least on the Nintendo DS.

Recently I was decidedly underwhelmed by the video game of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders.

Now James Patterson Women’s Murder Club: Games of Passion from THQ has had a similar effect on me.

In book parlance it’s more of a doorstop than a page-turning thriller.

In video game terms it’s distinctly average and it’s likely only fans of the series of novels it’s based on will find much fun hidden in this mystery.

The Women’s Murder Club in the title is not as you might think a group of ladies going around bumping off men who have wronged them.

Instead it is a quartet of friends in San Francisco who form a nifty crime-busting team, regularly meeting up over dinner to discuss their latest cases.

Though the district attorney, medical examiner and crime reporter members of the gang do appear frequently in the game, you spend most of the time playing as police detective Lindsay Boxer.

She starts to investigate a series of supposedly unconnected murders which soon become entwined.

The game is broken down into seven chapters, each one requiring the player to work through a series of mini games related to cracking the case.

Large segments of the game are taken up trying to find objects hidden around crime scenes and other places of interest.

This involves using the stylus to scroll around the screen, clicking on objects to scratch them off your list of required things to remove.

Sometimes you’ll be looking for murder weapons or footprints, other times it will be bizarre items such as symbols hidden around the scene. It can be a bit like one of those Where’s Wally/Waldo type puzzles.

Sometimes objects are in very odd places, such as an umbrella hidden in a tree or a hat on top of a lamppost.

Some of the searches become very tedious. There were scenes where I had to hunt for 17 pop cans and 18 tiny ticket stubs – these were painfully boring.

There are hints you can call on to help locate particularly difficult to find items but these are limited to three per chapter, and I found myself using mine up very quickly.

The hidden object sections require a lot of patience at the best of times but there are additional problems which make them even more frustrating.

The chief offender is the inaccurate controls. So many times I would tap on an item, only for nothing to happen. Then I’d touch around the outside of it and suddenly the game registered I’d clicked on the right thing.

On some levels I used up my final hint to expose the last item on my list, only to discover it was something I’d already tapped on numerous times.

This issue, compounded by some objects being incredibly hard to spot, meant I often resorted to randomly clicking around a scene hoping to get lucky and hit something I needed to find.

Away from the hidden object searches the game is broken up quite nicely by other mini games which are more fun.

These include a memory matching game to discover a murder weapon and a puzzle involving turning a board of cells the same colour to analyse ink found on a victim.

Another game entails winning a game of mahjong solitaire to uncover an apparent suicide note.

Meanwhile, you can question suspects and witnesses by choosing pictures from prompts relating to where you were when you found a particular clue or how a certain item links the person you’re speaking with to the investigation. If you don’t identify the picture hints correctly then your interviewees won’t answer the questions.

The mini games are quite engaging and thread the plot together nicely. It’s a shame there aren’t more of them, with the overall game weighted heavily in favour of the drawn-out hidden object portions.

The presentation in Women’s Murder Club is a mixed bag.

On the one hand the graphics are decent quality, being vibrant and clearly drawn.

But on the other hand the long strings of corny dialogue, coupled with the cheesy music, give the game the feel of a cheap made-for-TV movie, the kind of trashy flick that might come in the afternoon on Five after Neighbours.

The game is very short in length and it’s unlikely anyone will want to play through the main mystery a second time.

One clever add-on which is only available to players with the new Nintendo DSi is photo mysteries. For these you use the device’s camera to take pictures of family members and friends which are then used in a murder story.

James Patterson has become something of a literary institution with his prolific output of bestselling thrillers.

A decent job of converting such popular fiction into video game form could have resulted in an exciting and enticing game that draws players into the dangerous world of homicide investigations.

Sadly that hasn’t really happened here. Fans of Patterson’s work may enjoy being part of a Women’s Murder Club case but it’s likely they will have more fun continuing to read his novels instead.

Verdict: 6 out of 10 – Unnecessarily long and frustrating hidden object segments stifle this game and kill off its chance of being a true thriller.