Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law has a premise that many thought would be an infallible combination: the oddball characters and off-kilter comedy of Adult Swim's Harvey Birdman television show and the courtroom gameplay of the Ace Attorney series (also published by Capcom). On paper it seems like a match made in heaven, but unfortunately Harvey Birdman comes up short of both its inspirations and will most likely only disappoint fans of either series.

You play Harvey Birdman, former B-list superhero and current lawyer for Hanna-Barbera's downtrodden. Tasked with playing either the prosecution or defense - sometimes in the course of the same case(!) - Harvey has to smooth talk his way to potential victory in five (woefully short) cases. Other than this basic premise, the story is pretty much non-existent; you'll take on cases with no real connection to one another and they all end with some faux credits about an hour later. In the end it does make the game more akin to the show, but it also makes it feel disjointed, further serving to highlight how short each chapter, and in the end the game itself, actually is.

The gameplay here is very reminiscent of the Ace Attorney games; you spend the game investigating static scenes, talking with peculiar characters and examining key witnesses. At the start of each case, you're given five Gravitas, which equates to how much weight your arguments have; when you run out of Gravitas it's game over. You lose Gravitas by presenting incorrect evidence when examining a witness testimony and gain Gravitas by doing random things throughout the game. Oddly enough, you don't lose Gravitas by pressing a witness to clarify their testimony, which takes some potential thought processes out of the equation; you'll almost always start your examination by pressing every statement the witness made, in the hope of finding something there first. What removes the need for any real critical thinking is the ability to save anywhere, including in the middle of examining a witness. While the ability to save at any time is nice if you abruptly need to quit, the fact that the game doesn't delete the save when loading - along with the, at times, almost nonsensical evidence it wants you to choose out of a sizable list - means that this quickly becomes a crutch; why bother going back to the start of the case and manually skipping dialog and choosing answers you already know when you can just load from the latest testimony? Convenient? Yes. Challenging? No.

Unfortunately, the Wii version is very much a straight port of the PS2 title; there are no real Wii-specific controls, with the exception of the ironically "pointless" ability to point to your dialog option, and looking for evidence in the environment by pointing instead of moving a cursor.

In terms of being a game, Harvey Birdman is actually little more than a standard DVD menu in between cut scenes of dialog. While this can still make for an interesting game when combined with good writing, an interesting story and solid acting, that isn't the case here, as the narrative - or lack thereof - has multiple issues. First up, there is no overarching storyline holding the five cases together, so the characters never get a chance to develop. Not only does this destroy any hope of connecting with the characters on any level, it also means that if you didn't watch the series, the characters will be almost incomprehensible to you, as they receive little to no introduction.

Also hurting the story is the uninspired writing. The television series is full of smartly written, often random dialog that is almost always chuckle inducing, but the game usually fails to really nail its comedy, making most jokes only grin-worthy. The main reason for this is the lack of truly original jokes, as the ones present are so reminiscent of gags already done in the show that they come off almost as parodies; Peter Potamus continuously asks if you got that "thing [he] sent you", Phil Ken Sebben laughs inappropriately, followed by an odd quip, and Myron Reducto threatens to shrink things with his Shrink Gun. What all this means is that if you watched the show these jokes will most likely be stale, and if you didn't then they won't make much sense.

The quality of the cut scenes, which in a game such as this is essentially the main part of the graphics, look quite crisp and clean, at times looking better than the show (progressive scan as opposed to 480i). Unfortunately, at times the game inexplicably goes to a close up of a character and instead of redrawing the background image, it simply blows it up, making it jaggy and blurry. This, along with some ugly looking clips from the TV series, gives the visuals an inconsistent feel and hurts what the game is trying to accomplish - the feeling that you're playing an episode of the show. However, it's not a complete mess; almost the entire TV cast reprises their roles (Stephen Colbert is noticeably absent, though his replacements do a fair job of filling in the roles of Reducto and Sebben) and not all the jokes fall flat, so there's some humor to be found here. Along with the familiar jokes you've most likely heard from the show, the game also has a few Street Fighter III references throughout, and while these are pretty cool, it would have been nice to see these Capcom jabs fleshed out a bit more - why aren't they any Phoenix Wright references?

Despite all its other problems, where Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law truly falls apart though is in its lifespan; coming in at about four to five hours, it won't last anyone very long at all, and at $40 it's hard to justify anything but a rental. Even then, the lackluster humor and almost non-existent gameplay make this game only barely recommendable to Birdman fans that have thoroughly exhausted their Harvey Birdman DVD collections. Everyone else, steer clear.

Reviewed by Jordan Wasilka for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).