CSI Miami is a great game!
First of all... the storyline. You are assigned to be a detective to help out each of the characters of the CSI Miami Team. You work with one of the five original people ( Horatio Caine, Calleigh Duquesne, Erik Delko, Tim Speedle or Yelina Salas) on each of the 5 cases in the game. You also have Dr. Alexx Woods and Maxine Valera to assist you in your detective work. They help you to organize and process the victims and the evidence to help you solve the cases you work on.
Graphics and sound are pretty good in this game as at first blush I thought they migh be a little lame. The creaters actually got the characters to look just like they do on the show. The voice overs were very well done and that adds so much realism to you being in the game with the characters. Not only do the characters bring the game to life... but the environment as well is alive with activity all around. Most games I play that are like this (Myst for example) just had a picture with things you could interact with in it. This is similar to that but they creators of the game went a little further and added small but nice additions to bring the environment to life. Birds flying around, plant blowing in the breeze, fish in a fish tank swimming and several other things to enhance the gameplay and make you feel like you are actually in the room and not just looking at a picture.
The game play is pretty straight forward in that you have to collect clues by examining the crime scene and collecting evidence. You have an arsinal of tools (from tweezers,luminol, flashlight, finger print dusters) and many more. Each of your colleagues will help you in deciding what is best to use to collect the data or evidence you are currently looking at. Along with evidence collection, you will be working with Valera in the crime lab. Analizing bullet striations, dna, footprints and many other things under a microscope/computer/assembly table. Alexx Woods will help you to process the body for time of death/how they died and so on. As it is in the show... you must collect enough evidence to be able to bring in suspects for questioning. Yelina Salas will help you with the process of bringing in suspects... but you must have enough evidence in order for her to warrent a location search or a warrent for questioning.
You can also change how hard the game is by turning off hints. When you are processing a scene and your mouse pointer goes over an object of interest... it will change to let you know there is something there of interest for you. You can adjust the game to make it to where you are really having to search for everything. That along with learning how each tool works to help you makes this a great detective game to play.
In conclusion, if you love puzzle type games you will probably love this game. If you are a fan of the show... then you will probably enjoy this game. The storyline along with great graphics/sound... interesting gameplay and an ending that is pretty cool... makes this a game for any detective in your house.