It's a cold, hard fact that the last time the CSI franchise got its hands on the Xbox, it did horrible, unspeakable things to our beloved console. The evidence was clear, and the jury came to a swift verdict. People were surprised, because the various TV series all had high production values, great writing and intriguing cases...how did it all go so wrong? Post-mortem findings pointed towards poor 2D visuals and a host of bugs and glitches infecting the game, one that even the writers and voice talent from the show couldn't overcome.

Now, two years have passed, and CSI is ready to take a swing at Microsoft's ‘next-gen' Xbox 360. People are naturally wary of this new kid in town, having been so badly burnt by the original. The good news is that CSI: Hard Evidence goes a long way to correcting the two biggest issues the original had – all the locations are now rendered in 3D and look about ten times better, and the only bugs present in this CSI game are the ones that are supposed to be there. Sadly, for all the good it does, Hard Evidence also takes a few steps backwards as well, keeping the game from meeting the potential we all know it has.

Like the original CSI game on Xbox, Hard Evidence follows Gil Grissom and his team at the Las Vegas crime-lab as they uncover evidence and find the truth. There is five all-new cases this time around, including a cab-driver set on fire, a murdered eye-surgeon witnessed by a blind woman, and an 80s hair-metal band electrocuted on the eve of their big come-back. All of the cases are quite interesting, but lack the cleverness reserved for the TV series. While the cases may not be quite as exciting as their on-screen contemporaries, the best thing about Hard Evidence is that it manages to keep you guessing right up until the very end of the case.

This is no mean feat when you consider that you will be gathering and processing all the evidence yourself, as well as sitting in on interviews with Captain Brass and conducting a few yourself in the field. It's actually quite impressive that the game can encourage you to form your own initial conclusions and then make you question them whenever new evidence is uncovered. That said, progress through the case is largely linear, and it is not possible to falsely accuse and arrest people or botch the investigation.

Ultimately, this is the real weakness of the CSI game formula: you can never be wrong. Hard Evidence is clever in the way it lays out red-herrings and twists the plot, but the outcome is predetermined: in many ways, you're just along for the ride. This in and of itself isn't a deal-breaker, but the cracks start to widen when you realise just how simplistic the gameplay is. Much like in the previous CSI games, your crime solving skills essentially boil down to you moving the cursor around the screen clicking on anything that might look interesting.

At this point a review of Hard Evidence can really go two ways, because this simplicity of gameplay can be user-adjusted to make it either incredibly easy or unbelievably frustrating. There is a bunch of "assists” that can be toggled on or off at any time: do you want your cursor to turn green when you roll over a useful object? Do you want the game to select the right tool for you so you don't have to work it out yourself? Would you like a handy little checkbox to tick when you've tapped out every single piece of evidence in any given location?

It really is up to you to pick a balance you like, but by default the game has every single "assist” feature toggled to ON. This, coupled with the fact you can ask your CSI colleagues for a hint whenever you get stuck, means Hard Evidence can be a very, very easy game. But I would not be the wonderful reviewer you've come to love and respect if I didn't try both ways of playing the game, so let me break it down for you: the outcome of each case doesn't change at all, no matter how you conduct your investigation.

Simply put, you can complicate your life and add a whole lot of fruitless, random clicking, or you can play with the "assist” features on and have fun piecing the evidence together and leaping to conclusions like a champ. Or you can strike a balance: maybe turn the checkbox feature off so you won't know if you got every bit of evidence, or pick your own tools through trial and error – it's really up to you.

Sadly, the one thing you'd commit a triple homicide to be able to change is out of your hands: the visuals. Realistically, past experience with the aesthetic atrocities the CSI franchise has engaged in should have prepared us all for the worst, but somehow Hard Evidence hurts more than ever before. Maybe it's because we've all bought into this "next-gen”, "high-def” bullshit we're sold on a daily basis, but whatever the reason, CSI Hard Evidence is an unattractive game by anyone's standards.

The transition to fully-3D crime-scenes and locations does go a long way to mitigating the criminal conduct here, and moving around the game is far less cringe-worthy now. Of course you can still only explore on the rails, so while the added dimension does add some freedom, your investigation is still well and truly shackled. This is the least foul punishment that should be inflicted upon whoever did the character modelling and texturing in Hard Evidence though.

All your favourite forensic investigators from the show are barely recognisable, with Grissom and Brown being the most laughable. The travesty doesn't end there though: identifying stains and evidence against the low-res wall and floor textures is often an exercise in futility, and it isn't uncommon to gather evidence you can't even recognise unless the game tells you what it is. It's come a long way since the Xbox, but in the age of Gears of War and BioShock, it just hasn't come far enough to be passable.

The audio is a little bit better, thanks to the majority of the cast reprising their roles from the show and Willows and Sidle are hardly missed anyway with their two-bit imitations doing a passable job. The dialogue is decent enough, with plenty of puns and bad jokes from Brass and Grissom, but when it comes to suspects or witnesses, the dialogue turns into something even Days Of Our Lives would knock back. Aside from this, there's very little going on aurally; ambient sounds are...suitably ambient and the elevator muzak is rubbish but unobtrusive.

With only five cases, Hard Evidence is about half the length of the previous outing on Xbox, weighing in at about 5-7 hours depending on your pace. You get a rating at the end based on whether you found all the evidence, whether you needed a hint, how thorough you were (at clicking on dead-end links basically) and whether you were able to find some bugs for Grissom's collection. This rating is meaningless, and you'll unlock your hefty 200-point Achievement for each case regardless of how you score. The unlockables are pure fluff compared to some of the interesting stuff locked away in the other CSI game on Xbox, and as such, once you're done, there's very little reason to come back.