The evidence that you collect and transcripts of your interviews go into your case file for examination at any time. For the evidence, you will have the help of specialized divisions of the police department at your disposal. You can drop evidence at the crime lab for testing for prints, DNA, etc., the surveillance unit will tail suspects for you, and the records department can research documents and do background searches on suspects. To make use of these services, you drop the evidence off at the appropriate location and then after a short time they will contact you to let you know that they’ve finished their work and have the results for you.

Your case file lets you examine the witnesses and evidence

Analyzed evidence and personal interviews will reveal new locations and/or suspects that bear further investigation. The locations of the investigation scenes and suspects/witnesses are marked on a map of New York. To visit a new location or conduct an interview you simply click the map location and you are taken there. Once you’ve gather enough evidence and testimony, you serve an arrest warrant, the arrest is made, and you move to the second part of the case, the trial.

The first step in the trial phase is to identify which evidence you will take to court and which witnesses you would like to have appear during the trial. Questioning witnesses at trial works the same way as it does in the first phase of the case: you are given a list of possible questions and you select the one you want to ask. Again it is not too hard to discern the proper line of questioning. There is a bit of a new twist though, now the defense attorney can object to your questions and you to his. The good news is that you don’t need a legal degree to know when to object or to know which response to select when making your case to the judge. Of course this also leads to the bad news which is that it’s not too challenging to pick the appropriate response. New evidence or the existence of additional witnesses may come to light during the trial, so you may find yourself doing a little investigation during the trial phase as well.

By including elements such as items that are not evidence after all and evidence that can be thrown out of court, Double or Nothing adds a level of challenge not found in typical point and click games. However, the challenge level is not on par with the puzzles found in a lot of adventure games and adventure gamers may find the game too straightforward for their tastes. Fans of the TV series will probably appreciate it though, especially since the cases in the game do a good job of capturing the feel of the stories in the show – although sometimes the stories try a little too hard to add in twists and turns.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 68%.  Fans of the TV series and casual gamers would do well to give Double or Nothing a try, but it probably won’t appeal to seasoned gamers.

System Requirements:  Pentium III 500; 96 MB RAM;  16 MB Video RAM; 12x CD-ROM;  650 MB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.

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