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Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion
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Graphics & Sound:
The graphics in Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion look pretty good and the scenes set the stage nicely for the murder mystery you’ll be investigating. The victim is a fashion designer, so the people you’ll be interviewing will be from the fashion world and, as such, some will be a bit outlandish. You’ll visit your police department, the crime lab, a yacht, a stylish loft, a photography studio, a nightclub, a grimy apartment and several places in between and you’ll be picking up items at every location to aid you in your case.
For the most part, things look like they should and aren’t hidden in a tricky fashion. Down South, where I live, we call drinks such as Coke and Pepsi "soft drinks" and this game refers to one item as a "pop can." For the first few minutes, I didn’t realize what they wanted me to find, and then when I found it, the can was oddly colored in bright blues and greens, so it didn’t look like what I was expecting. Aside from that, things looked right. However, Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion uses a twist to the standard hidden object game in that you must first find your tools of the trade like a magnifying glass, a fingerprint brush, a fluorescent light and a flashlight, before you will be able to find blood stains and fingerprints. The main thing that I didn’t like was the fact that there was no pinch to zoom feature available and one scene, in particular, was a two story apartment and the items to be found were fairly tiny. Had I simply been able to zoom in on an area, I would have much preferred it.
There’s not much music to speak of in Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion, except, as I recall, at the nightclub. There some ominous tones that play while on the map and there are ambient noises on each scene, such as cars honking, sirens going off or birds tweeting. Other than that, there aren’t even voiceovers, only text to read. Still, the condescending attitude of your chauvinistic boss, "Sarge," comes through loud and clear and you can almost hear the attitude in the conversations you’ll have with a particularly snooty fashion model. |
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Gameplay:
Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion is a hidden object adventure where you will use some of the items you find along the way to solve a murder. When a fashion designer is found murdered in his car, you are tasked with solving his murder, even though you are the newbie at your precinct and your superior never lets you forget it. You’ll first have to locate your forensic tools scattered around your office and then you’ll use these at crime scenes to locate things like a tiny note, blood spatter and fingerprints, or sometimes even clues shrouded in complete darkness! Items requiring you to use your forensic tools will be listed in green on your list, instead of white like everything else, as will any other items that are crucial to solving the case and will send you to a new location to investigate. You’ll use the required item to highlight a clue such as a fingerprint, but you need to tap it right away because they fade after a few seconds.
After you’ve collected the items from your list, Sarge will give you a heads up on where you need to go next, but it doesn’t really matter because you will always know where to go since those are available on your map as options to visit. If you are playing on Timed Mode, you’ll have the stress of a ticking clock to keep you moving quickly, but you’ve also got a Hint button below your list of needed items to help you if you get in a jam. I did find myself using the Hint button on a regular basis because some items were really tiny and obscured by something else in the room, so I was glad it was there. To change things up a bit, you’ll complete mini-games back at the lab to investigate your collected clues.
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Difficulty:
There are two ways to play Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion: in either Timed Mode or Relaxed Mode. Timed Mode pits you against a ticking clock, so naturally you’ll feel more stress about finding the items quickly, whereas relaxed Mode is pretty much the same, just no clock to beat. Even if you play on Timed Mode, the time limits are more than ample to locate the missing items, especially considering you have a helpful Hint feature. Unlike some games, the Hint does not pinpoint the item. Instead, it zooms in and highlights the area where the item will be found. Also, if you tap on too many incorrect spots in a short amount of time, you’ll get a message that pops up where your character tells herself to slow down and look more carefully. Other than that, I don’t see any penalty for incorrect clicks. Personally, I completed the game easily on Timed Mode and then started a game on Relaxed Mode for comparison’s sake. What I did notice is that some of the items were different the second time around, so a second playthrough does not guarantee that you’ll know where everything is. On this same note, there was some repeat in the gameplay during my first run when I had to revisit crime scenes or locations and noticed a lot of the same items were on the list again.
Although the game is relatively easy to beat and any veteran of hidden object will breeze through it for the most part, I didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t pinch to zoom to find tiny items easier. As I mentioned earlier, with some scenes being two stories and all of the locations being on one screen, things were really small and it would have made for a nice feature if I could have zoomed in for a better look. |
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Game Mechanics:
Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion consists of tapping to pick up items of interest, or sweeping your fingerprint brush, magnifying glass, fluorescent light or flashlight across an area to reveal a print, blood stain or item. In between the hidden object scenes, you’ll have mini-games to complete to process the evidence. Some of these will be puzzles where you have to piece together clues like a torn up note, while others will be anagrams to solve, and still others will be "spot the differences" or matching puzzles. I hated the "compare the DNA" puzzles where you had to find the differences because although they weren’t super hard, they made my eyes swim with their similarities. The anagrams were lots of fun and the puzzles where you were presented with a series of fingerprints and you had to pick one from the list to match with your collected print were neat as well. You didn’t have much time to do it, so the pressure was on, but they were clever.
There were several locations that were in complete darkness, forcing you to use only your flashlight to see and find the items. These were pretty difficult because in order to move the flashlight, your finger obscures part of your lit viewing area. Because of this, often I would tap the flashlight to an area of interest and then remove my finger and search. When I was ready, I’d then move the flashlight’s lit area to a new spot. This worked pretty well.
Overall, Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion is a decent hidden object adventure. It has some clever puzzles and I liked that the player had to use forensic tools because it helped to sell the story that you were a cop investigating a crime. It’s definitely not my favorite hidden object game, but it’s worth a spin if you like hidden object with a twist.
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
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