James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet

Here in the UK there used to be a weekly programme called Crime Watch aimed at those community-minded individuals who enjoy helping the police out by tracking down murderers and con artists.

The members of James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club are a step up from this ‘call in worried about next-door’ kind of crime-stopper. Instead, they take investigations into their own hands, helping out the police at every stage of the investigation.

On the evidence of this multiple-system port from I-play, though, they’d be better off disbanding the organisation altogether and going back to a normal job.

Murder he wrote

The case opens in a classy comic-book style, detailing a jogger as he stumbles across the body of a woman, dead on a boat with strange Chinese markings burnt into her skin.

As the titular Women’s Murder Club (alternating at points in the story between the three members), your task is to get in the way of the police investigation, hunt down the murderer yourself, and pick up masses of useless junk for no apparent reason.

Yes, it’s a hidden object game – a genre that involves tapping objects hidden around each screen, and one that tends to work very well on touchscreen devices.

It’s murder on the touchscreen

Not so here, though, for I-play has managed to somehow completely mess up the controls.

Want to scroll the screen? Hold down your finger and move it - oh no! The game has registered a tap as well – here’s a points penalty for being so careless.

How about zooming in and out using pinch-to-zoom? How about the game locking the zoom level in place at random intervals so that the only way of completing a scene is to quit out to the main menu?

You can’t even resume a puzzle, as the game loves crashing if you turn off the screen. While on other mobile devices such a technical issue could be passed off as a compatibility problem, Windows Phone 7 handsets are designed to be almost identical in specs – there’s no excuse for this.

Murder most harmless

If you’re really persistent then there's a relatively harmless story waiting for you on the other side, although it really does fall into the ‘Sunday afternoon’ billing of murder mysteries.

The locations you visit are generally quite tricky to solve, although it does feel cheap when the game insists on sending you back to the same location more than once, and a number of items are so vaguely described that you might as well tap on the screen blindly anyway.

‘5 bottles’, for instance, turned out to be five identical brown bottles, and not any of the ten or so other bottles in the image.

So if you see James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet on your WP7 handset, delete it immediately, lock the doors, and call the police.

James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet

All the fun of hunting down random objects and cracking a tough case is rendered null and void by some atrocious controls and puzzling bugs
Score
Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).