Rating: 
Summary: CSI: Dark Motives -GREED
Review: Here is what I got out of this game:
Buggiest game I have EVER tried in over 10 years. Multiple
install attempts all failed, system is optimized for gaming,
and UBISOFT offers poor support to say the least. Would LIKE
to be able to acutally PLAY this game.
1. UBISOFT made a GREAT game, the first CSI for the PC.
2. UBISOFT made a LOT of MONEY on that game
3. UBISOFT made a SECOND game (CSI: DARK MOTIVES)to cash in on
the first
4. UBISOFT SOLD that game with LOTS of bugs still on it
5. UBISOFT still can't fix it.
6. UBISOFT has lost LOTS of burned customers who could not run or
install this game and I am one.
7. CBS should SUE UBISOFT.
I was and still am not impressed by such poor performance in a product from a major software firm. Sorry I did not check reviews first.
Rating: 
Summary: Fair Game
Review: *NOTE: This review is from gamespot.com*
Almost a year to the day after Ubisoft released its first PC adventure game based on Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS' wildly popular crime-solving TV series, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the company has churned out a sequel in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Dark Motives. Similar in design to VU Games' Law & Order games, the first CSI title focused simply on giving the player the chance to investigate and solve crimes that were comparably designed to the kinds of mysteries you'd see on the show--though perhaps a bit too simply. In fact, the first CSI game was almost entirely devoid of challenge and basically just walked you through the motions of gathering evidence, effectively holding your hand through any portion of the game that might require critical thinking. Dark Motives is a lot like its predecessor in most every fundamental way, though with a bit more in terms of challenge and a bit less in terms of hand-holding. Still, serious adventure gamers will find little use for Dark Motives, though serious fans of the TV show will likely take something positive away from it. Once again, murder is afoot in America's playground.
Dark Motives presents you with five different mysteries to solve over the course of the game. As it starts out, you are once again a new recruit of the Las Vegas CSI unit, and it is your job to pair up with one of the many familiar CSIs from the show in order to solve these heinous crimes through technologically advanced methods of evidence gathering and analysis. Each of the game's mysteries is pretty unique and well written, and they range from investigating the cause of a motorcycle stunt gone wrong, to solving the murder of a nameless transient, whose body has been dumped in an abandoned insane asylum. As you gather your evidence and begin to put together a picture of what exactly happened, the game will provide you with CG-based reconstructions of possible scenarios for the crime, as well as some rather gruesome anatomical depictions of the horrible things being done to the crime's victim, à la the TV show. The game certainly earns its M rating through some of these reconstructions and a few rather risqué plot points and offhand jokes. Overall, the game does emulate the show quite well, and true fans of CSI will likely get a kick out of the experience. Dark Motives' gameplay relies on pretty much exactly the same method of crime solving as its predecessor. In each location, you start out with a specific area in which you can investigate. When you move the mouse cursor over certain sections, the cursor turns green, indicating you can investigate further. Often these locations yield evidence or at least something noteworthy to your case for future reference. At your disposal, you have a wide array of detection and collection tools, such as a UV light to detect hidden stains and bruises and varying types of fingerprint detectors for different types of surfaces. All of your evidence eventually finds its way to the crime lab, where it is analyzed or put into the computer or under a microscope for your own analysis. You can cross-reference prints against the police database, compare different samples of hair, or compare tire tracks against one another. All told, there's definitely more for you to do in Dark Motives than in the last game, and the game is better about letting you take care of matters rather than simply doing everything for you. Unfortunately, there still isn't much challenge to the game as a whole. For the most part, each mystery's progression of gathering evidence, interviewing suspects, and eventually acquiring warrants and conducting interrogations is quite straightforward. If by some chance you do get stuck, it's probably because you've simply overlooked an obscure piece of evidence somewhere. Though these pieces are rarely obvious by themselves, you can easily narrow down where exactly to look simply by asking your current partner for help; or, to be more precise, you can ask your partner if you can ask a question, and then you can just look at the title of the question you want to ask. Actually asking questions docks points from your evaluation at the end of a mission, but the titles of the questions, such as "How can I find out more about the origin of the wheelchair?" pretty much tip you off as to what exactly you're missing, and you don't actually have to ask a question. Additionally, once you get a feel for how the game's pacing and design work, the last few missions become almost sadly easy, as it's just plain obvious what it is you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to go about doing it. Dark Motives, like last year's title, is a fairly modest game in terms of length. Each mystery will take you anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, and the game overall shouldn't take you more than five hours to finish. Of course, there is the added bonus of theoretically trying to go back and get a perfect score on every mission, but surprisingly enough, even with every helper turned on and even after asking several questions to our partner, we never completed a mission without getting the highest ranking, and we unlocked every single extra item on the first try. Whether this is a bug or just an insanely easy game design, we will likely never know. One issue that is definitely bug-related is that the game isn't entirely stable. On a high-end PC, there were times when loading missions would cause the game to crash to the desktop, and occasionally, extended play sessions would simply cause all the text from the game's menus to disappear. These issues were infrequent but were still odd considering how light the game's hardware requirements are. There are some other quirks here and there--for instance, occasionally the game will allow you to get ahead of the plot, providing you with questions and answers to scenarios you haven't experienced yet--but as with the stability issues, these are few and far between for the most part. Fans of CSI will likely enjoy the game's representation of the show, but anyone serious about adventure gaming will probably just find the game boring and stupidly easy.
The big draw for Dark Motives is that it features the full range of voice talent and appropriate character likenesses from the TV show. Last year's game was rather disappointing when it came to visuals, but Dark Motives does provide somewhat of an upgrade. The models for each of the game's characters are much better, and they look and move more naturally, though the lip movements as the characters speak to you are still pretty badly synced. The environments look a bit less fake and a tad more interactive in Dark Motives, though it's still plainly obvious when an object is something you should be looking at, as it's significantly brighter than the background that surrounds it. The entire cast of CSI is on hand for voice work in Dark Motives, including William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Paul Guilfoyle, and Jorja Fox. The range in terms of how well these actors translate their roles to a voice-acting capacity is erratic. Some, such as Fox, seem to relish the experience and really make their characters come alive. Others, like Petersen, seem bored stiff and serve only to make their portions of the game less interesting. The remaining portions of the game's audio are pretty well done, including some great-sounding background music and similarly excellent sound effects. Though Dark Motives is definitely a much-improved game over last year's effort, its appeal still remains elusive to all but the most vehement fans of the TV series. This is not a game that typical adventure game fans will get much out of, simply because it isn't designed with them in mind. This is a game designed specifically for a general audience, and thus, the bulk of what would normally make an adventure game challenging or unique has been stripped away in favor of the most user-friendly interface and game design possible. If you are a fan of the show, then this likely won't bother you, and you'll be able to more easily forgive the game's merely average gameplay and more readily appreciate how well the game mimics the style of the show. For anyone else, Dark Motives probably won't do much for you, and it is probably best left on the shelf.
Rating: 
Summary: Another solid title from the CSI franchise
Review: A quick note on the CDRW/DVDRW issue. It is absolutely true that UBI Soft prevents installation of *some* of their titles from drives with write/re-write capacity. Chessmaster 9000 is one of a number of recent titles to be crippled by this 'feature'. It's also true that if you call UBI Soft tech support, and ask about this, that some of their reps will tell you that *all* of their PC titles are 'protected' this way. Not so. Despite the disturbing confusion on UBI's end, this game *is* installable from a CDRW/DVD, or DVDR/RW drive. That aside, fans of the first CSI game are in for a treat. Dark Motives has all the aspects that made the first game a success, and a slew of new features, and deeper investigations/plots that will pull you back in for another great ride.
Rating:
Summary: CSI games.
Review: All the games they have are great, but like another here said, you will get stuck on a level if you don't pick everything apart, and then when you find the darn thing you'll think, wow, that's all it was! So don't try to move on till your sure you got all the clues in each level cause you'll get stuck and won't be able to move on. Like in the first part, you have to get all the clues there or you'll just keep going in circles and can't advance to get a search warrent, or you won't be able to question someone till you get the clue in each scene.
Rating:
Summary: Buggy and Quick, but fun for CSI Fans
Review: CSI is a hugely popular TV show, and the first Crime Scene Investigation game was relatively fun and quick. Unfortunately they raced this second game out the door before it was ready. On the positive side, CSI fans will enjoy the tie-ins. You get the cool voices of the real actors. The visuals look like the actors, although at times it appears you're watching a badly dubbed Japanese movie based on the bad lip synching. You get cool music and cut-scenes just like in the TV show. It really does feel at times like you're "in" the TV world. But where this COULD have been a great game with more quality testing and work, they obviously rushed to get this to the public and rake in the cash. The game crashed constantly on several testing machines. You now have to have the CD in the drive to play, even if you do a full install. They warn you that only "regular" CD players work well - that it won't necessarily work on a DVD player or CD-writer. Since most new machines come with those options and not just a plain CD player, that could cause trouble for lots of people. Even when the game does play smoothly, the gameplay is iffy. People vanish. Items vanish. There's a patch on the Ubi website but it doesn't help with many of these issues. The gameplay is supposed to have you investigate the clues, talk to suspects and figure out what has happened. But most of the times the clues are pretty obvious. The questions are all very leading, in essence telling you what to do next most of the time. For the price on the box, you'd really expect more than the 5 hours or so of gameplay you get as a result. Maybe if the puzzles were harder you'd play a given mission for longer. I suppose with all the crashes, it does actually take you longer to get things going smoothly, replaying missions to try to get past the buggy spots. Still, if you're a fan of CSI, you'll want to get this to immerse yourself further in the CSI world. Who knows, in another few months they might actually put out enough patches to fix the bugs - but the gameplay itself will still be simple and quick. Hopefully before CSI 3 comes out they'll do a bit more development and gameplay testing.
Rating: 
Summary: Hello UBI--don't release the game w/ known bugs
Review: Every fifteen minutes or so I have to exit the game and restart because all of the text disappears and sometimes the entire picture goes. Even though I did a full install to my hard drive, this game takes forever to load. Went to the UBI Soft site and guess what? They say they know about this problem and are working on it!! Unfortunately for me, a person who anticipated this title and paid full price, this is not what I want to hear. Are you so greedy UBI that you can't fix the bugs first? Furthermore, I had hoped the game would improve over the first but it hasn't much at all. I love hearing the voices from the show and "working" with the main characters, but stop chastising me when I am just looking at stuff. The other characters also get to ask all the good questions. There's no real investigation for me to do--it's all pointed out. (Note that even when the arrow/cursor is turned off the hot spots glow with a different color and you can't miss them.) When I find an interesting piece of evidence, I don't get to follow up on it (for example the broken piece of the eyeglass in "Diggin' It"--you look at it under the microscope and then Sara goes on for several minutes about the properties of glass and eyeglass prescriptions--Why can't I research that?) The cases are all easily solved in a short amount of time (even with all the restarting). I really feel as if I paid too much and that's including the book that came with it. I am very dissappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: As good as the first one
Review: Fans of CSI (like me) would love it... same sort of the style as the first one, with some improvements. The only bad thing is that it has a lot of bugs, but they are quickly fixed by exiting the game and going back in again. I've had two bugs per case that made it so I cuoldn't even play the game. It just makes it sort of annoying. Other than that, the game is great. :)
Rating:
Summary: About 20 stars........ or more
Review: First i'll like to say this game totally ROCKS!!!!!!!! But the people who give it 3 or bellow stars just think there is a bug in the game just because you get stuck in a level. Well I had that same problem to, I thought there was a bug in my game even though I restarted the first level 8 times to be exact. on the ninth try I beat it. But the key of it all is to always analyse things you've already analyzed beacause that is where you never make it off a level. you have to look real hard for clues everywhere and scan every thing in for prints.
On the first level it is just about this messed up bike crash that someone almost died in. That is where people get stuck. Be sure to analyze EVERYTHING, even if you have analyzed it to the farthest extent.
The second level is about a homelesses man murder. That case is easier than cake.
The third is about a 2 year old murder when they find old buried human bones.
The forth is about this play, and during rehearseal this woman got shot and killed.
The fifth is about this missing komodo dragon, and a REAL human toe.
So I like the game. My best guess is that you need an XP to run it, But It's on my top game list.
Rating:
Summary: CSI Game crashed my P C!
Review: Had lots of probs with the game from having to download a patch to resolve certain issues initially and then having to deal with my PC crashing constantly after the patch downloaded! I had to uninstall the whole thing......
I will give it another go later as by then the GAME CO might have resolved ALL the glitches.
Rating:
Summary: CSI Dark Motives
Review: I agree with these other reviews about the game. My husband bought this game for me for my birthday (along with a new computer). CSI Dark Motives has SO many bugs! I don't think it's that they scrimped on the graphics, I think that it's that they place too much importance on the graphics... You can tell that they were really impressed with the art when the "reward" for winning a case was to let you look at their concept art. (This stuff would've been better as a "Extras" on the menu.)
They should've taken a hint from the better CSI shows and written better plots. In one case, for example, you find all the clues, do all your lab tests, and then, ask the guy the questions they give you to ask and he confesses everything--yawn. For this game, you need no reasoning skills at all (they only get you into trouble because you can't proceed along reasoning skills until you've jumped through all the program loops). All you need is the ability to click a mouse and let the game tell you the story. Sort of an interactive storybook.
In one case, I figured out the story, tried everything to click on a piece of evidence, but it wouldn't let me until I had done somethingg else so that the game could TELL me to go and get the piece of evidence and then I could click on it. SO FRUSTRATING!
I might buy another CSI game in the future if they can write better plots, maybe have a twist in one that includes an earlier case, and finally, let me use my own reasoning skills.
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