Among fans of Dick Wolf's Law & Order television empire, the hierarchy of shows goes something like this: Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, then Law & Order: Criminal Intent (and the less said about Law & Order: Trial By Jury, the better). Legacy Interactive has already churned out a number of PC adventure games based on the original series, the last two actually being thoroughly competent games despite being largely targeted at the most casual of audiences. For its latest Law & Order game, Legacy opted to skip the obvious choice of creating a Special Victims Unit game, and went straight to Criminal Intent. OK, that's fine. After all, the show's more psychological nature could have easily lent itself to a more intriguing brand of investigation. However, any notion of that goes flying out the window mere minutes into any of Law & Order: Criminal Intent's assorted murder cases. The clunky interface, leaden pacing, mostly ugly visuals, and host of irritating and detrimental bugs pretty much squash whatever potential this game might have had, and set the Law & Order game franchise back about three years.

It's murder most broken in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Criminal Intent does offer quite a bit more content than any of the previous games. With the whole jury trial aspect of the game shirked (it's altogether absent in the TV series, too), you are instead treated to three available murder cases from the get-go, with a fourth that opens up after the other three are solved. Each case follows the usual brands of twists and turns you'd expect, with a few different suspects with equal amounts of motive, plenty of obscure clues, and periodic puzzles that need solving. The puzzles are actually more abundant in Criminal Intent than ever before, and many of them are legitimately challenging--though they also seem just a bit out of place. It's one thing to spend some time reassembling a torn-up piece of paper that could yield a clue; it's quite another to hack someone's computer password using a model of a human body and trying to figure out the right order of selectable parts. When was the last time you saw Vincent D'Onofrio do that on TV?

The oddball puzzles are forgivable because they do add some real challenge to the proceedings. Few other things about Criminal Intent get such a pass. One of the biggest overall changes to the formula is the new third-person cinematic perspective. You no longer view the game from the first-person. You see D'Onofrio's Detective Bobby Goren character, and by pointing and clicking the mouse, Goren will walk to wherever you tell him to...eventually. Goren isn't exactly spry, so he tends to take an overly long time getting from place to place--a fact made all the more obnoxious by the copious amount of backtracking and wandering you'll end up doing throughout the game. Every time you travel to a location, you always start out in a neutral spot that's typically bereft of useful clues or objects. If you end up going back to that location later to find an obscure piece of evidence, you'll have to start back at that spot, and spend the time making Goren walk back up the stairs, or down a long hallway, or whatever it takes. Realistic, sure, but it kills the pace of the game and makes repeat trips an irritating chore. And this is all assuming that Goren will actually walk where you tell him to, walk to a spot that doesn't block your cursor from selecting a piece of evidence, or will not get stuck walking in one place, forcing you to reboot the game. And that's not a safe assumption.

The puzzles aren't devoid of challenge, but they seem marginally out of place in the context of a Law & Order game.

That's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the bugs in this game. Animations will frequently hang, glitch, and periodically cause characters to just disappear. The game also has an unbecoming habit of crashing at random intervals. Click on the wrong piece of evidence at the wrong time, and it's right back to the desktop with you. If for any reason another window pops up and minimizes the game, it crashes every single time. So, as you can imagine, it's a good idea to save as much as possible--a fact made much more infuriating by the lousy save system.

Every time you want to save, you have to bring up your PDA menu, click on the bottom icon that takes you out to the main menu, select "save game," and then create a new save every time. You can't overwrite old saves, even if you name them the same thing. So by the time you've spent the eight or nine hours necessary to beat the game, you'll have a metric ton of game saves floating around, all because you can't trust the game to go more than half an hour without crashing in one spot or another.