NCIS

NCIS is a casual game for fans of the show. While it could have been far more ambitious, it's a decent detective game.

User Rating: 7 | NCIS PS3

By TarotMasterJF | Review Date: November 5, 2011

Your level of enjoyment in playing NCIS will largely depend on two factors - 1) what kind of NCIS fan you are, and 2) what kind of gamer you are. If you're not a fan of NCIS, you might as well stop reading now and find something else to play, unless you already love detective games or pixel-hunt games like Mystery Case Files and Cate West. Otherwise, NCIS is a game made for its fans, featuring all of the major characters from the series (although few of them are actually voiced by their respective actors), and the game's case scenarios were written by the same people who script the TV show. And in case you haven't noticed, Ubisoft published the game to appeal to the same players as its CSI games, but NCIS actually improves in this area, as development was shifted from the Chinese company that handled CSI to an internal Ubisoft studio that would better understand the property. All-in-all, NCIS pulls off everything that it tries to do in a reasonable fashion. Motion controls work well with the Move (though much more basically than a game like Heavy Rain), and Dual Shock analog controls are quite manageable if you prefer a standard controller. The cases are relatively compelling, and some of the storytelling is genuinely interesting. Graphics won't knock your socks off, but they're functional. The sound matches many of the show's mainstays, from the "thump" sound with its black-and-white snapshot at the beginning of each scene, to the opening theme and other tracks pulled straight from the series. Gameplay is varied, allowing you to pixel-hunt for evidence, photograph crime scenes, move bodies, help with autopsies and other forensic analyses, and even interrogate suspects. That being said, the simplicity of each task, combined with a completion meter, make it impossible to mess up, and once the 5 hours of crime-solving is done, there is little reason to play again. On the flipside of this, if you're looking for some quick trophies (including a guaranteed platinum), NCIS is a pretty easy way to get them, and the game retails for $39.99 instead of the usual $60.

So, if you're a fan of the show and enjoy video games on a casual level, NCIS is a decent purchase. However, the most discerning NCIS fans and hardcore gamers will find a lot to b**** about here. As I have already mentioned, the characters are not voiced by their actors, aside from David McCallum for Ducky and Robert Wagner for DiNozzo's dad, neither of which perform as well as they do on TV. Ducky even comes off as seriously creepy without the support of NCIS's on-set chemistry. The character models don't always look great, either. DiNozzo looks nothing like Michael Weatherly, McGee and Ziva look good from some angles and bad from others, and Abby probably would've been okay if her body movements weren't so unbelieveably stiff. Gibbs fares the best in his appearance, but his voice and lines are so non-Harmon that it's annoying. Everything about the game could've been more ambitious, especially considering that NCIS is the highest rated scripted show on television and has climbed in viewership every year for nine seasons. CBS could've taken a paltry $10 million out of the show's multi-billion-dollar revenue and really contracted something special from Ubisoft, but instead, they made something that's only slightly better than the other games of its type. In that way, NCIS is a missed opportunity, but it will still hold some interest for casual fans of the show or of detective gaming. Could be worse...…

As for me, I am both a hardcore gamer and a very discerning fan of the series. I have watched every episode of its 8 1/2 seasons to date, have all three soundtracks looped in a playlist on my iPod, and I even own the board game. I have tremendous respect for the series and would rate it as my favorite, even above other powerhouses like Battlestar Galactica, The Walkiing Dead, The X-Files, and Lost, which round out my Top 5. Before the game was released, I tried to pitch my own ideas to CBS Consumer Products, both for a game concept and a graphic novel series (I knew it was a waste of time but got some juvenile enjoyment out of trying). And when I heard that the game was becoming a reality, I made a series of stalker-like phone calls trying to figure out which company was behind it. This resulted in me finally calling Ubisoft in Canada and trying to put my high-school level profenciency in the French language to unconventional use. This is all very embarrassing for a 30-year-old man like myself, but such is my level of obsession over the show. I discovered what I wanted to know, though, and a few months later, it was confirmed that Ubisoft was indeed the developer and publisher.

I had hoped for a much more revolutionary concept in the NCIS video game. I envisioned something more kin to Mass Effect 2, with the Washington Naval Base acting as a hub of operations, story missions representing the TV show's major plot arcs, optional missions filling in background information and showcasing the show's more self-contained episodes, and a game-exclusive arc serving as the climax and ending. I had hoped for a character creation system (Create-A-Probie), with your player-generated agent being recruited by Gibbs in the first mission, while Kate is already on the team when you join. I imagined playing through the content of Seasons 1-6, with the return of Ziva from Tel Aviv leading into a climactic confrontation against remnants of Ari's terrorist cell hitting home in the naval yard. I wanted to call it NCIS Anthology, with the intention of releasing expansions for Seasons 7, 8, and 9 as DLC. And of course, I wanted the actors from the show to not only voice their respective in-game characters, but also to perform the motion capture work to maintain absolute consistency with the on-set dynamic. I even imagined an elaborate, extended opening sequence set to Ministry's remix of the NCIS Theme. Of course, none of this transpired in the final version of the video game, and I cannot say that I'm surprised. The vision I had would have required close to $25 million to develop. But is $25 million really too much to ask? When CBS sold syndication to USA, they sold it for more than $2 million per episode, and considering they get much more for advertising and extended merchandise deals, a proper video game budget would have been a drop in the bucket. The video game industry is also much more profitable than movies and television, and since NCIS has a constantly growing audience of approximately 20 million viewers per episode, a truly great video game would have had a built-in fanbase willing to snap it up at full price on day one. The point is, while the actual game isn't terrible, I would like to have seen some stronger effort, possibly even a trend-breaking attempt at making the first great game from a TV show. No contender deserves this more than NCIS, but now that a mediocre detective title is on the shelves, the possibility of getting such an ambitious NCIS game is much slimmer. I would love to see the game sell well enough to warrant a bigger project, but in its current state, I doubt it will ship more than 60k units across its many platforms.