Review #71: Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

 Take Phoenix Wright, next, mess everything up.

 I bought this game expecting a Phoenix Wright clone. It is a Phoenix Wright clone, made by the same developer, although not the same team. But.... it's so bad. It's hard to fit the game within a genre, the best fit would be ab adventure game. You must travel through different places, talk with people and gather Evidence(Items) that you must later use in court to prove the witness wrong. Or get more information out of them.
  The game really doesn't have a story, but rather, 5 different and independent chapters, although they must be played in order. Each case is really short, probably 30-40 minutes long at most. Basically, the whole game is as long as one Phoenix Wright case. Really, really disappointing. The game also tries to be funny, it tries really hard, but while I may have chuckled a couple of times, the game's humor didn't really do it for me. Maybe fans of the show might get more of it, but I didn't.

 As previously stated, each missions plays more or less the same. Someone gets accused of something and you must save them. This involves visiting places and examining them, searching for evidence. Every now and then the game might have you use one of the items you have on the Evidence in order to trigger something, but these are very few, select occasions. When you go to the stand, it's standard Phoenix Wright fare, witnesses say their part and you must examine it, finding flaws in their statements...except that most of the time, the evidence that you must present makes no sense. Sometimes the witness won't even be lying at all, and you just need to present the item they just talked about just to get more information out of them. It's a bit offputting and dumbfounding.
 The presentation is it's biggest asset, it has the voice actors from the show and the game looks really good. Some of the animation shows that it was, probably, made in Adobe Flash, but it doesn't matter. While I guess they were going for fidelity, I'm really not a fan of the voicework, it's too exaggerated. Maybe fans of the show will "get it", but to me, it tries too hard to be funny.

 Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is a very boring game. It's very short, and it's just no fun at all. I admit I chuckled a couple of times, but most of the time I was bored out of my skull. It tries so hard to be funny, but most of the time it falls flat on it's face. This is not a good game, not by a long shot. And this game got a physical release while Phoenix Wright V didn't, Capcom, get your priorities straight.
 2 out of 10