Police work is boring. I was led to believe through my many years of observations from various TV crime dramas that the job of a police officer usually involves a lot of running after criminals through litter strewn back alleys, plenty of sliding over car bonnets and a guarantee of a shoot out against a crime lord and his cronies in a deserted fairground or abandoned warehouse. Thank you, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, for erasing that picture, as despite being based on the thousandth spin-off the hugely popular Law & Order TV franchise, the game captures all the mundanity of real life police work and none of the excitement of fictional drama.

Mirroring the show, the game centres on Detective Robert Goren, a hotshot member of the NYPD major case squad, who have to solve all manner of brutal homicides. Through his deductive reasoning and ability to work his way into the mindset of suspects, Goren has earned himself something of a prestigious reputation as one of the best in his field, but his skills are tested in the game, as he has to solve four of (apparently) the toughest cases he's ever worked on.

Criminal Intent adopts an old school style of point & click navigation, although I hasten to add that using the words 'old school' in this case is just a nicer way of saying long dead, extinct and archaic, as if the last decade of reinvigoration for the adventure game never happened. Navigation is performed laboriously through one action: clicking. Endless clicking, tireless clicking, click to move, click to interact, click for everything, all handled within the claustrophobic confines of lifeless 2D backgrounds. Movement is as prehistoric as the action needed to instigate it, with Goren unable to work his way past tables and chairs without getting stuck or meticulously plodding a five mile walk around these objects. Slow? Yeah, just a little.

The cases almost spark some interest, with mysterious deaths and no initial clue as to who the killer is or what their motive might be, so you must build up evidence, gather clues and question potential suspects to weed out the perpetrator, aided with a nifty criminal profiler, which eats up certain key pieces of evidence to build a profile of each killer. It almost makes the game sound interesting, but there's that word again - almost.

Despite the initial buzz of being an amateur armchair sleuth, the cases eventually become too overdrawn to sustain enjoyment and end up testing your patience to the absolute limit. Looking for clues becomes a long, drawn out task of scouring each and every screen for items that show up as being interactive, sometimes these appear as mere background objects and sometimes not, but you'll never know until you've clicked on each and every one. Miss anything - and thanks to a rather unhelpful cursor that barely registers when it finds a key clue, this is something that happens a lot - and you'll find yourself trawling back and forth, endlessly searching for that one piece of evidence required to advance the story.

At his disposal, Goren also has a team of research assistants, crime lab analysts and forensic experts, each of whom can provide vital information on each piece of evidence you gather. This is great, except for two things; firstly, while sometimes offering important critical information, all too often each member of this elite team of New York's finest spurt out things you've already worked out for yourself. The second and most baffling thing is how each member researches every item you submit, regardless of whether they are skilled enough to provide any helpful information for those particular items or not. This gets especially annoying when the research woman drags you from a case because she's analysed an item, only to tell you that she can't be much help, as that particular piece of evidence isn't in her field of expertise. Fair enough, but why analyse it in the first place? And why oh why couldn't she just tell you this over the phone, instead of forcing you to backtrack to the office to hear her in person?

There are puzzles too - it wouldn't be a hackneyed 2D point & click game without them. They often appear as picture puzzles or overly elaborate security systems, which incorporate some of the strangest lock systems known to man. These are all well and good for the five minutes of brain teasing they coax out of you, but they're spread so thinly that not even they can detract from the snail's pace of the rest of the game. And seeing as I'm on a roll dishing out gripes I have with this poorly executed and tirelessly tedious game, I'd like to take a minute to discuss the sound. Usually, having a Hollywood actor providing vocal work gives the game the kind of big budget professionalism that games without such actors can't, yet even with lead actor Vincent D'Onofrio (he was the evil alien in Men In Black) reprising his role for the game, Criminal Intent falls way short of the mark, providing a voiceover that sounds like the actor was half comatose when recording.

If all that's not enough for you, this is a game riddled with technical faults, which given that it looks like it fell out of the tail end of 1994, is saying something of the effort put into it. The transitions between screens takes too long, slowing the already dire pace even more, while there is an annoying tendency for the game to crash. Also, a word on the save system; you can't overwrite saved games, so during the course of your investigations you'll amount to no less than several pages of save files - a quick save key would have sufficed.

Police work is dull and so is Law & Order: Criminal Intent. While fans of the show may be more forgiving of its glacial sized flaws and see past the shoddy exterior to the gold that's probably hidden somewhere deep within, this as an adventure game that's too old, too boring and too broken to be of much enjoyment to all but the most hardcore of Law & Order fans.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).