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Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law
Score: 80%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: High Voltage Software
Media: UMD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Adventure/ Puzzle/ Themed

Graphics & Sound:
Animation makes for great game translations. 2D is naturally less taxing than 3D, so it's no surprise that Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law looks great on PSP. You'll swear you're watching an episode of Harvey Birdman as you play the game. In fact, you are... The major characters from the show all make appearances and will even talk on screen as you watch the moving pictures. Okay, that's my last attempt to write as surreal a review for this game as the experience you'll have playing it, I promise. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is definitely a surreal experience. Fans of the show will enjoy that they'll get to experience five new episodes. It's a more interactive experience, but you'll still spend more time watching than playing. This is truly eye-candy for gamers, a hybrid between television and portable gaming. Compared to most games on the market for PSP, the graphics are pretty rudimentary, but they perfectly capture that Birdman essence. Other than listening to a lot of dialogue, there is background music scattered through the game but not a lot of musical features or soundtrack. The perfect thing about Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is how it manages to be completely accessible for non-gamers. The interface is really simple and pictorial - you can see right away what you need to do and you'll be selecting options from menus 100% of the time. It's the opposite of those twitch-reflex games on the market, so you can relax those amped up tendons and enjoy the show.

Gameplay:
Courtroom drama and point-and-click gaming come together nicely in Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. Old-school adventure games have seriously fallen out of fashion and it's high time they made a comeback. Nothing beats presenting a little treasure hunt, exploration, and lots of dialogue to get your gaming juices flowing. Piecing together clues from the items you gather and talking to characters you meet throughout Birdman's world is what you'll need to do in order to solve these five cases. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law puts Harvey into some difficult situations, including escaping from jail, defending several people accused of stealing his stuff, and watching his wife get a series of backrubs from other guys. It's easy to sell Harvey short, but do so at your peril because he always solves the case.

This time around you'll help solve the cases, usually in the same order or operations. After a brief introduction to the case, you'll have the chance to explore your surroundings and look for clues. At times, you'll uncover new characters with which you can interact, and sometimes they'll introduce you to new locations. Eventually and in a completely random fashion, Harvey will end up in the courtroom. Madcap hilarity ensues and eventually the case is solved. You'll have the chance in court to listen to testimony, examine and sometimes cross-examine witnesses. After you hear a little narrative from the character that happens to be on the stand, you'll be able to select various parts of that narrative. Your goal is to pressure them by asking more questions if you suspect any part of their story is false, or present something in your collection of evidence that relates to something they said. It is harder than it sounds, and especially because the "facts" of each case are almost always random. As long as you pay attention and have enough risk tolerance to make some educated guesses, you'll be fine.


Difficulty:
If you happen to guess wrong in the courtroom, you'll lose one of your finite number of crests. If they are all taken away, you'll end up replaying the game from the last checkpoint. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law has a smart system for saving progress that helps avoid the need to replay the entire case. You don't get to dig so deep a hole for yourself that you can't escape. Each time you make progress, you'll have the chance to save and then continue later if you step away. It sucks replaying since you really don't want to watch all the dialogue again. Nothing about actually playing Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is especially hard, but you'll need your thinking cap on in order to expose the facts behind each case and force the bad guys into confessing. Even though there are a finite number of answers or questions from which to choose, it would have been helpful to have some kind of contextual hint system. In the event of a wrong guess on your part, Harvey will utter some nonsensical and amusing comment. If the game were slanted to be friendlier to more casual gamers, the third or fourth time you guessed wrong you might get a subtle hint from Harvey along with his wise-cracking remarks. Players that don't see the connections between things will spend a lot of time in court going through the same sequence of events until they get it right; the other side to this coin is that the game is rigged so you can't really get to court without gathering the necessary items, so it's almost impossible to "lose" once you hit the courtroom.

Game Mechanics:
Adventure games have largely fallen out of favor due to their less sophisticated graphics and linear storytelling. When free-roaming games started to become commonplace, point-and-click options began to seem very limiting. There was never a more simplified control scheme than this type of game, which makes it ideal for casual gamers. As casual gaming exits its Tween stage and passes into adolescence, expect to see a resurgence of adventure titles or creative point-and-click adventures. The reality of the best examples in this genre is that they tightly controlled the story elements, but let players gather items and build the story along a number of possible paths. I'm referencing the old text-based adventure games, mostly. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law doesn't fit that bill or meet the standard of greatness in this regard because it is so completely linear. Most story elements are contingent on other story elements, so you won't even have access to certain locations or objects until you click on others. As mentioned before, there are a finite number of clicks to be had, so it isn't long before you've solved one case and moved on to the next.

It's all lots of fun, and offers inestimable amusement for fans of Harvey Birdman. The rest of us might take pleasure in this if we have, in the past, enjoyed a good adventure or point-and-click game. Fans of other courtroom-drama games might also find something of interest here, but the madcap and surreal style of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law gives it a very different flavor that might lose some people or go right over their heads. Don't get me wrong, this isn't sophisticated comedy by any stretch, just very out-there humor. It's a good game overall and a brave attempt to represent a genre that hasn't seen much play in recent years.


-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications
AKA Matt Paddock

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