James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D is an enjoyable puzzle game a la Professor Layton in an unfortunately B-grade wrapping. With enough budget and a few more unique puzzle types it might give the Layton series some competition. As is it may provide fun puzzle solving challenges, but the poor production values take the whole experience down a notch.

The story of the game is set in the 60’s and is told in a sort of noir style. You are a contestant on a puzzle game show, and after the first episode of the show a previous winner is found dead. Soon enough more ex-winners are found dead, all with various puzzles scattered around their corpses which lead the way to the next crime scene. An old friend, Booker, is the FBI agent investigating the Puzzle Killer murders and everyone in the game show is a suspect. It’s an interesting set-up other than the strange puzzle TV show which would be extremely boring for viewers, but the plot has a bunch of holes which are never really filled.

Characters are all voiced (except you, the silent protagonist) and are displayed on screen with stylised snippets of full-motion-video, which works surprisingly well at creating the noir look (think Hotel Dusk, or Last Window, but with poorer art.) The music adds to the film noir atmosphere too, with a lot of jazz instrumentation. I particularly enjoyed the fan letters you receive as you gain popularity on the TV show – these created a sense of a living, breathing world much better than the crime scenes or TV show did. With a little more attention and budget this could have been a very well put together puzzle-adventure. As it is, it looks more like a DS game than a 3DS game. It is let down by low-quality textures and too much of the game taking place in the same location (the TV show set) in the same way. Fortunately you can skip cut-scenes by pressing the X button.

There are a surprising number of puzzles in Hollywood Crimes 3D, and a lot of variation between them. They’re mostly fairly standard types, although with some twists and some types I’d not seen before. For each type there are only at most six or seven puzzles, and for many there are only one or two instances. Unfortunately there are very few really unique ones (like the logic puzzles in Layton), but I can’t complain about the quality and quantity that is available. Every now and then a puzzle makes use of the 3D screen, but these puzzles are a little cumbersome because they’re still operated via the touch screen and the circle pad. The box says there are over 140 puzzles, and I took 10 hours to do all of them. It’s possible to finish the story of the game by only doing about 60 puzzles, but the puzzles are generally far more interesting than the story so skipping puzzles is skipping the good part of the game.

For each puzzle there are three hints provided, and the game is very generous with the number of hints it allows you to collect. For some puzzles these hints pretty much give you the answer, but the game will warn you if the hint is going to do this. For some the hint is barely enough to help, but the puzzles are not of a particularly difficult level and with hints just about every one is doable in a short time. There was one puzzle which caused a problem for me – I had an answer that was correct according to the puzzle rules but it wasn’t the answer the game wanted. But I generally didn’t have issues with understanding what I needed to do or with the game not recognising my answer correctly.

James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D is a solid puzzle game and it kept me going, plodding through the story to get to the next puzzle. It doesn’t compare favourably with the Professor Layton series, it’s closest competition, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get it as well. I hope Ubisoft commit to this series on the 3DS and put a bit more budget behind it to go along with the solid concept.

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