Chinatown Detective Agency Reviews
Those small - or big, depending upon your personal view - irritations aside, there's a lot to enjoy about Chinatown Detective Agency, and the story's just about worth the ride. Personally, I'm a little tired of the penchant for retro pixel art, but if you can make your peace with the other lightweight or frustrating mechanics, Chinatown Detective Agency introduces you to a memorable cast and takes you to some striking places. What a crime it is, then, that such a promising premise doesn't quite do enough with them.
Chinatown Detective Agency is a solid hardboiled detective adventure with a unique DIY approach to clue-solving-but it's most impressive as a cultural artefact.
Though the occasional bug or out-of-place mechanic bogs down the experience, Chinatown Detective Agency delivers a fulfilling investigator fantasy with real-world sleuthing.
Chinatown Detective Agency is sometimes a little too clever for its own good, but it's well written and charming with it. If you can overlook the issues with the save system, it's well worth a look.
Chinatown Detective Agency is made in the image of classic adventure games and never aspires beyond that. Meeting it on its own terms, it’s an adequate cybernoir mystery with a compelling lead and colorful scenery. If you’re not into that already, this game probably won’t tickle your fancy very much.
Chinatown Detective Agency is a stylish cyberpunk detective game with a wonderful cast, and it has a cool real-world aspect to puzzle solving. But it does feel a bit like doing homework sometimes.
But it’s that homework element that will make or break the game for you. If you have a truly open mind, and you want to look up the source of some weird quote, you will learn a lot, experience a well-realized world, and put away some fictional bad guys. You’ll get to see moody lighting, hear some catchy bleeps, and have the satisfaction of a mystery well solved. This is a genre without a lot of greats, and Chinatown Detective Agency comes pretty close.
Chinatown Detective Agency is a disappointing miss, that, with just a little more time in the oven, could so easily have been a compelling hit.
Chinatown Detective Agency has unique and interesting gameplay which is hampered by bizarre design choices and numerous bugs. Updates are coming though, which should hopefully realise the game's potential.
Chinatown Detective Agency does some things right, but where it fails, it falls hard.
Chinatown Detective Agency is a detective noir point and click adventure inspired by Carmen Sandiego. It involves real world sleuthing that will take you out of the world in order to solve puzzles. It has great art and character designs. It also has good voice acting during most major cutscenes.
General Interactive deserve applause for their unique approach to detective work in adventure games, but the central mechanic in Chinatown Detective Agency feels like it deserves to be in a more substantial game.
It is a game that is completely unafraid of letting you make mistakes and wasting your time and money, and this ties flawlessly into its well thought out setting and very memorable characters who will regard Amira with the results of your effort. The pixel art that makes up environments is gorgeous and expressive, with the nighttime streets of Singapore being my personal favorite to just spend time looking at. While it is disappointing how common the minor UI and audio bugs are, this is nothing that can't be fixed with a few patches and does not take away from what is a mystery-solving experience that fans of this genre absolutely should not miss.
Chinatown Detective Agency is a title that anyone who loves taking on the role of a gumshoe in a futuristic, pixelated world will enjoy. With clues, ciphers, and other mysteries to solve, this title will make you use your brain and challenge you!
Chinatown Detective Agency is an engaging point-and-click adventure with gorgeous art direction that falls just a bit short.
Chinatown Detective Agency could be rewarding for the average pantomath and the story is intriguing stuff but if you don't enjoy doing your own research in order to progress in a video game then you'll likely find it to be more of an annoyance than a fun adventure.
Chinatown Detective Agency’s main draw, the real-world investigation, is a great idea that worked very well for the most part. It will be interesting to see if it can survive the internet’s aggressive SEO algorithm, but I still think it’ll be a fun time for any mystery game fan. Unfortunately, multiple bugs and glitches that should have been caught before launch ruined a lot of my experience, along with a truly annoying inability to save mid-mission. The good news is, the developers have already been very active in fixing many issues with the game, so the grievances I have with the game may very well be temporary.
Jumping online to play something, fair enough, that’s everyone’s responsibility. But Chinatown Detective Agency is asking players to commit, unfailingly, with the penalty of wasting your own time. That’s a stopper for me, and I think that it should be for anyone else who has a life outside of their computer.
Chinatown Detective Agency is an investigation game with an atypical proposal, which seeks to encourage the player to research on their own in the real world. Despite this, it is a very limited experience and one that deserved more polishing to really become a good example of the genre.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Chinatown Detective Agency is an interesting proposal that has a beautiful pixel art section, although it could go even further if it had set its mind to it.
Review in Spanish | Read full review