Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments Review

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is the next generation mystery game in which you will have to solve murders by gathering clues, piecing together experiments whilst listening to Sherlock repeating himself over and over again.

The game has some intriguing attributes, it takes some of the mechanics seen in the recently released Murdered: Soul Suspect and implements them really well.

Alike there is a clue tree in which you must piece together evidence in order to further your investigation, there are puzzles to solve, areas to search and various characters to talk to. With each character comes a character profile. With each mystery comes a chilling tale and with each chilling tale comes an inevitable prosecution.

The game’s visuals are quite nice, taking advantage of the systems in order to produce crisp and vibrant levels. The levels are large, interesting and quite beautiful. Character models look fantastic and the voice acting is much more attuned to the period this time. The voices fit the characters and everyone sounds how you would expect them to.

It is a third person game, but you can toggle between third and first person, I personally preferred first person as I could then see the beautiful areas as well as endure a more personal experience.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments offers a reasonably long experience clocking in at around 11 hours or more, this is mostly due to the amount of cases you undertake but the games slightly shady underbelly also helps make the experience longer.

As most of us know longer isn’t always better and this can easily be said about this Sherlock Holmes.

The game doesn’t hold your hand, but it is rather slow paced so not only do you have to find things out yourself, you also have to endure an even slower paced game because of this.

Sherlock Holmes seems to run out of words in places too, for example searching a garden will prompt him to say ” This garden is well kept” then the option to search will re appear offering the exact same sentence. Search over and over at the same spot and you get the idea!

Lip syncing is again a problem, the developing studio seems to have long running issues with mouth movement. This is again apparent with stiff mouth movements that don’t quite go with the voice overs. It does get extremely annoying as a lot of the game scenes show various characters in conversation.

The game also suffers from extremely long loading screens in which you will have to endure Sherlock Holmes riding in a carriage either reading, smoking a pipe or simply doing nothing at all. Sure, you can look at your case book during these moments but no gratification is truly found by doing this and I often found myself yawning a lot.

These various obstacles sadly make Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments less immersive. The atmosphere that is there throughout the messy murder scenes and areas to search throughout London ends up being lost at the conversational intervals.

I can say though apart from a few issues the game is not a point and click adventure, it is immersive, atmospheric and fun in places. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is the best game in the series, but it is still not half as good as it could have been!