"Concentrate on what doesn't lie: the evidence. "
The concept is simple; you're the newbie in the Las Vegas crime lab and are given five different cases to solve, with the help of your fellow crime scene Investigators from the series. You must use your sharp eyes and powers of deduction to find the evidence and prove the guilt (or innocence) of your suspects. Or, to put it another way, click on anything when the cursor turns green and rotate everything in your inventory to find all the fingerprints, before putting all your new found "evidence" into machines in the lab, which pretty much do the job for you. Inbetween you also need to keep an eye out for bugs (for Grissom's collection) and check every nook and cranny to get your "Thoroughness" points, which Grissom uses in your final assessments after each case to rank your CSI-ing abilities.
Sadly, while the core elements of CSI are present the makers apparently forgot the things that make the show so eternally popular. Like pacing. And humour. While you get the voices of the actors doing due diligence, their lines are awful and aren't really delivered with the same sense of fun you get in the show. Teamed with shoddy graphics (its hard to believe this was released in 2007, the same year as Virtual Fighter 5 and Call of Duty 4) and a very irritating procedure of having to go back and forth to Brass's office to get warrants in order to further your progress (apparently Brass can't use his phone for this, though he can call you at other times) the game is ultimately disappointing.
At about ten hours long, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Hard Evidence is definitely a rental game, as you don't want to be paying full mark for this. On the Xbox 360 version the achievements are easy - all you need to do is finish the game to get 1000GS - and once you let yourself get on with it, and not fixate to much on its flaws, you can have a reasonably entertaining experience. If you're not a fan of the series definitely give this one a wide berth - though it's not quite a rotting corpse it's certainly on its way to the morgue.