Game Review: James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club

James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet wins the award for longest title ever, but that’s about it (Video Review).

Overall Score: 1/5

The game is based off a mystery story from James Patterson’s original novel, which was then made into a PC game, and then into a mobile phone game. I’m sure the novel must have been good, but this Windows Phone game has a terrible story, useless gameplay, and disappointing visuals.

Gameplay: 1/5

All you do in this game is play “I Spy with my Little Eye” and you have to find useless objects in scenes that relate to crimes. Why are you looking for a spider and a flashlight and a butterfly? No reason at all. It has nothing to do with the story or anything else. The developers of the game needed a way to lengthen the gameplay, so they put in useless object finding missions. And that’s all this game is. There is the occasional instance where you have to take a swab to a victim’s pants to take a blood sample, but those are rare and are handed to you where you have to do the required tasks, you don’t figure them out yourself. And the story is so completely linear that nothing you do in the game even matters. Oh and nothing was personally interesting about the story. You don’t have to solve anything. You find random junk and click through cartoon strips. Oh, the controls are also very touchy.

Presentation: 1/5

The visuals look okay until you zoom in to find smaller objects, and then you see that they are low resolution textures that have blurry edges. We all know Windows Phone 7 can handle better visuals than that, so that is a sign of the developer’s laziness. And the music repeats itself after three minutes or so. There’s no vocal dialog in the story at all, you have to read everything through cartoon strips. The developers had a great chance to enhance the story experience by adding sound effects to the cartoon strips, like if the character is running, put some running sound effects in to bring the story to life. But they didn’t.

Lasting Value: 2/5

Remember when you watch a really great mystery movie or read a fantastic thriller novel and you HAVE to watch/read it again because it was so interesting? Well when Women’s Murder Club claimed to be “a thrilling page turner of a game”, I hoped that would be the case. Instead, the story is really dry and doesn’t make you want to play it again to understand its complexity, since there isn’t much depth to it. And beating the story will only take about one and a half hours. Then you are done with the game, unless you would want to compete for high scores (by getting faster times at finding objects).

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Title: James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet
Price: $2.99
Publisher: I-Play