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Track down the evil and destructive fugitive Dr. Chaos, as you hunt down clues in the exciting seek and find game Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos. As an elite agent for Interpol, it is your mission to eradicate his trail of corruption as it takes you around the world from one international city to the next. Use your investigative skills to quickly gather the evidence needed to bring him to justice.

Genre: Adventure

Publisher: Microsoft

Developer: TikGames

Online Play: 4 Co-op

Local Play: 4 Co-op

January 6, 2009 –
Downloadable games have been around on videogame consoles for a few years now, and it seems like every conceivable genre has come along for the ride. Games that we once thought of as PC-only lunchbreak time wasters are now $5-$10 a pop on Xbox Live Arcade, for good or ill. Now a new style of game has made its way to the Xbox 360: the seek-and-find.

Also known as a hidden object game, this genre presents you with a static image and asks you to identify objects within the frame. You’re usually given a time limit and awarded points based on how quickly you find every item. With the benefit of a mouse (or a stylus on the Nintendo DS), these games can be fun for a spell, but my first experience with a console attempt, Tikgames’ Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos, has not been encouraging.

Interpol casts you as a special agent with the eponymous international law enforcement agency, and you’re called away from your vacation to track down the infamous Dr. Chaos. Apparently he and his minions have been wreaking havoc all over the globe, and it’s up to you to track him down. To accomplish this, you fly to exotic locations like Barcelona, Rome and Cairo and examine cluttered scenes for “clues.” As you make your way through the game, you’ll come across dastardly evildoers like The Artiste and The Hammer. Scary.

Click here to see Interpol in action (HD available).

When presented with an image, say, a street scene in San Francisco, you’re given a time limit and a number of hints. Along the top of the screen you’ll see a list of the items you’re looking for (baseball bat, key, passport, etc.), and you use the analog stick to scroll around the screen and pick the sneaky little suckers out. When you find it, tap the A button and check it off the list. If you tap in too many of the wrong places, you’ll lose time, so you can’t just guess (and yes, I tried).

As a seek-and-find game, Interpol works well enough — it’s the presentation that ruins it. The images are of extremely poor resolution, which makes it difficult (and frankly quite dull) to stare at the scenes for any length of time. There’s a zoom function that allows you to examine each scene in depth, but it really only makes the bad resolution more apparent. Using the left analog stick to scroll around the image works passably, but it’s not as accurate as a mouse or stylus, which can lead to some frustrating moments, especially when time is of the essence.

The other major problem with Interpol is that the puzzles can be frustratingly inconsistent. I ran into several situations where an example of an object I was supposed to be searching for didn’t count. For instance, in Beijing I was asked to find three fans. But when I clicked on an oscillating floor fan, I was denied. Apparently I was supposed to only click on paper fans.

Over in jolly old London town, I was told to find maps, but clicking on a folding map of London got me nada. Only maps hanging on the walls counted. Repetition of objects is another annoyance — Dr. Chaos’ organization seems to have left several umbrellas in every town in Europe.

Man, Paris is cluttered.

Interpol has some nice touches. Some of the backgrounds move to give some depth to the scenes, and there’s definitely an addictive quality to the hunt for hidden objects, especially in the more exotic locales. There’s even a multiplayer co-op function — both online and offline — but it’s fairly bare-bones. The game doesn’t track your scores independently, so there’s no way to tell which Interpol agent is the sharpest (Hint: It’s not IGN Xbox editor Erik Brudvig).

Closing Comments
Interpol is good for a few short bursts of seek-and-find fun, but it?s just not a game that?s very well suited to the console. Add that to the poor image resolution, inconsistent puzzles and overall shaky production value, and you have a game that?s probably not worth the download.

IGN Ratings for Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos (X360)

Rating Description

out of 10
click here for ratings guide

4.0
Presentation
No widescreen, repetitive puzzles and inconsistencies.

3.0
Graphics
Poor resolution. Not a good idea in a game where you stare at the screen for hours.

6.0
Sound
Middle-of-the-road music and sound effects.

5.0
Gameplay
The analog stick controls don?t work all that well for this genre, and the objects in the puzzles are repetitive and inconsistent.

4.0
Lasting Appeal
Although the clues change each time you play a puzzle, that doesn?t make it more interesting the second time around. Multiplayer isn?t much of a draw.

4.5
Poor
OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)

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