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Law & Order: Justice is Served
 What luck that this latest Law & Order game is set in the tennis arena because I'm a long time tennis fan, of women's tennis in particular, so I'm well and truly on the right wave length for this game.
If you are a fan of the Law & Order TV Series you'll also be on the right wave length. In this latest game there are once again some familiar characters to meet. Jerry Orbach is back (along with his trademark sarcasm) and so is Elizabeth Rohm, lending their voices to their respective characters, and this time Jesse L Martin joins in. If you're a tennis fan you won't miss Patrick McEnroe either, and you, of course, join the team as a rookie dealing with both the investigation and the prosecution.
This preview is based on approximately 5 hours of gameplay and it's all very familiar if you have sampled either of the preceding Law & Order games. There have been some changes and improvements but the game is familiar enough so that not having a manual for this preview was no problem at all.
In fact the point and click interface is very simple and there are text prompts to walk you through familiar actions as they first occur. There has been some tweaking of the interface to make it more intuitive but at the outset the most noticeable change is the missing options screen that was provided in the previous games. Now you don't need to decide if you want help with searching or interviewing, or whatever.
In fact this 'function' of the game that previously adjusted the difficulty level has been made redundant because the cursor is more versatile and automatically changes when there is something to do, and conversations are much more flexible. You can ask a lot of questions but, of course, it's still a good idea to try to extract useful information.
 The game is set at the US Open Tennis. One of the women players has been found dead in the locker rooms. First it's your job to search the crime scene, interview all the characters/suspects and negotiate your way through the game till you make an arrest and, hopefully, get a guilty verdict at the prosecution.
This time there is a larger variety of characters to interrogate and the story begins to unfold offering any number of motives ... money, jealousy, drug dealings ... and I'll leave you to discover the rest. There's the pushy mother (or is she) to interview, the coach, the ex coach, the manager, as well as a couple of other players, and the list goes on. Careful questioning reveals that each has a possible motive and, of course, you are left to sort out the intricacies of the various relationships.
As well as dealing with the interrogations there are puzzles too. A combination lock to deal with, a torn letter to piece together, a music box to open, and more. I nearly fell over when I encountered the music box puzzle but my panic was all in vain. Thankfully there is a way to solve this problem logically if you're like me and couldn't possibly reproduce a tune in a million lifetimes.
Well the acting is just fine from all involved, and with that familiar music you can't forget that you're playing a Law & Order game. The graphics are improved too, especially for the murder scene and locations that are available for searching, although some of the characters are still a bit fuzzy. As usual a journal catalogues all your conversations and of course you can send evidence for analysis or request research or get psychological profiles on your suspects. A great innovation in Justice is Served is that you cannot retrieve irrelevant evidence once it has been examined or researched, so your inventory shouldn't need purging.
Without the difficulty levels I thought that maybe the game would be a tad too easy but the extra complexity makes up for this. Perhaps the generic replies for the conversations could have been a bit more imaginative, but thus far there's plenty going on. There's enough suspects and motives to keep you on your toes and I've 'pegged' more than one potential perpetrator but I'll probably be wrong because I haven't nearly finished the footslogging.
In short, Justice is Served is looking promising, and I'm looking forward to getting my man (or woman!). Law & Order fans should watch out for this one.
Copyright © Rosemary Young 2004.
All rights reserved.
System Requirements:
Windows 98/2000/Me/XP, Pentium III 600 MHz or equivalent, 128 MB RAM, 1.5 GB available hard disk space, DirectX 7, DirectX 7-compatible 16 MB video card, DirectX 7-compatible sound card.
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