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Last night there was a murder and you must prove your innocence! Crime Time is a text/graphic adventure with a graphic window above the input window. The latter is divided into three sections: a movement rosette, a text box containing a number of commands such as EXAMINE, USE and TALK TO, and another box containing all location objects on view plus your inventory.

Control is via joystick. You move and click the pointer over the desired action, then on an object. Although this system mostly works well, accurate positioning of the pointer can be fiddly at times. It's a shame the keyboard isn't supported. It would have been preferable to have used the cursor eys to move down the word list and return to input the action.

Graphically, Crime Time is initially appealing although boredom does tend to set in at times as the designers have used a limited amount of location graphics to represent all of the rooms. As you might expect, these are accompanied by location descriptions. What you don't expect are these descriptions to contain banal humour, offensive words or downright confusion.

The game, which began with much potential, careered downhill the longer I played it. The quality of the puzzles is pretty dire. Not only are they linear but they are poorly designed, adding nothing to the atmosphere of the game. The characters lend nothing to the storyline, interaction being a waste of time and effort, examining the 'empty' locations is repetitive and unrewarding... I could go on.

Crime Time was a good idea, but the poor and immature designers have sabotaged any chance it may have had.

Presentation 68%
Simple, easy-to-use joystick operated menu system. Sadly no keyboard support.

Graphics 70%
Colourful graphics become boring as many screens are repeated.

Hookability 45%
A cinch to get into, but empty locations and unrewarding gameplay create boredom.

Lastability 40%
Poor puzzles and repetitive examination responses combine with the lack of atmosphere.

Overall 47%
Gut-wrenching humour, linearity, poor puzzle design and offensive responses put the dampeners on a potentially good game.