NCIS (for Wii)

We have been watching NCIS since Season 1.  It’s one of our family’s favorite shows.  Although the children don’t watch it anymore, they’re very familiar with the characters.  Meanwhile, our nine-year-old is really into  “spy” stuff and “detective” work.  She is going to flip over this game.

It is rated T for “teen,” but (so far), I haven’t found anything I would consider inappropriate for her.  There are crime scenes, but there isn’t anything (that I’ve seen yet, anyway) that’s actual violence that occurs during game play).

I was not expecting much from this, honestly.  I thought that game play might be kind of lame, but that it would have some appeal because of the connection to the show, etc.  I was pleasantly surprised.  There are some aspects of the game where it doesn’t really need to be interactive, but the creators have gone out of their way to find ways to make it interactive, so you aren’t standing around watching things happen.

Each “episode” provides a case for you to solve.  You have to go to the crime scene, find and photograph clues, process the clues, and solve the crime.  The episodes were more complex than I thought they might be.  The remote was used in a variety of ways.  And there were a variety of types of “puzzles” to solve and activities to complete in the course of solving the crime. You lift fingerprints, find bullets, match these to fingerprints and slugs in the database, check for intersections in telephone logs, track suspects via GPS, etc.  And of course employ logic to determine who could have – or couldn’t have – committed the crime.

The only real downside is that this is really a one-player game.  If two people play together, you just have to take turns completing the activities.  The other negative – albeit  a minor one – is that the characters don’t really sound like their television counterparts.  It would seem that the game’s writers are familiar with NCIS (the wording typically sounds like the television characters), but the actors are not (the delivery does not sound like the television characters – with the exception of  Ducky).  That’s a pretty small detail, though, and if you think of this as a “crime-solving” game, rather than an “NCIS” game, it’s a complete non-issue.

This will make a great gift for NCIS fans and mystery fans alike.

$39.99

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Disclosure: Ubisoft provided me with a copy of NCIS for Wii to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions are entirely my own.