Law & Order: Legacies Critic Reviews

I actually enjoyed the game. It's not meant to be a fast-paced action game, but a game to make you pay attention to what's going on around you, and to think about what you're doing and what kind of impact it'll have on the outcome. The major misstep was giving to option to replay any scenario in an episode, as it pretty much kills the replay value, but other than that, I really enjoyed this game.

Ultimately, Law & Order is a well-paced and enjoyable experience for fans. The combination of hand-drawn backgrounds and cel-shaded character art is a nice blend, marred only by some odd shadow effects. I didn't experience any glitches with the game other than the odd audio crackle, even with the in-game audio settings turned down.

Overall, I didn't particularly enjoy the first episode of Law & Order: Legacies. I tried for a while to get a perfect score, so I kept replaying conversations until I got them right, but even so the episode only took me about two hours to complete, and the case wasn't exactly fascinating. Worse, the graphics are a little too much on the cartoony side, which works better for funny adventures than it does for serious games, and the voice actors all had a tough time impersonating the characters from the show (although otherwise they performed their lines well enough).

Three episodes in, Legacies offers a highly scaled-back version of the familiar cops-and-lawyers formula that doesn't do the intriguing storylines full justice.

Law & Order: Legacies is not about making you the detective or the prosecutor. It's about making you the most basic trainee; the one who sits in a small room watching recordings of professionals at work and answering rudimentary viewing comprehension questions. There is some vicarious pleasure in being carried along on a wave of correct answers, but seeing that wave continue undeterred despite your missteps is a disheartening reminder that you are an insignificant part of the proceedings.

I can't decide whether Legacies is still a game or just a quiz enriched with poor audio-visual materials. It would be a pity if Telltale continued to spiral down.

Crude short and average – that's the overall feeling of Law and Order: Legacies. Someone should wake up the boys from Telltale Games before it's too late.

In the end, Law & Order: Legacies just feels like you're watching a slightly interactive episode of the TV show.

Ordinarily I like what Telltale Games puts together, but this just looks like a slap-dash excuse to cash in on a television property.

From gameplay that boils down to memory quizzes to poor production values to bland stories, there is no reason you should play this game, no matter how big a fan of adventure games or Law & Order you are.