For more on NCIS, check out our full NCIS review. Or, for more of the best Nintendo Wii games for a 10 year old, why not try our Family Game Finder
NCIS: Based On The TV Series is a point-and-click game where you join the cast of the TV show to solve four crimes, covering murder, espionage and terrorism. You'll need to investigate crime scenes, search for evidence and interview suspects, before heading back to the office to do some forensic analysis, conduct a couple of autopsies and hack into some computers. If you're a fan of the TV show - or even if you just like solving a good mystery - then NCIS is the game for you.
Compared to some of the other point-and-click games and their 'unusual' solutions for problems, NCIS' puzzles are pretty logical. In terms of accessibility, things are mostly pretty straight forward - you'll find yourself locating bullets, matching up finger prints and completing some simple memory-based mini-games to hack into computers. The only part that may really pose a problem are the sections where you need to match up related evidence and answer some questions about your conclusions - although if you do spend a while on these screens, the sets of evidence start shaking as a not-so-subtle hint.
The controls are pretty simple to get your head round too - on the Wii, everything is done by pointing the Wii Remote at the screen and pressing the A button on things you want to interact with, so if they can handle similar games like Sam and Max, Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident or even Zack & Wiki: Quest For Barbaros' Treasure, they'll be more than fine with NCIS.
While there is some violence and gore in NCIS, it's not quite as bad as you may expect. While you'll spend a lot of time examining murder scenes, which often have blood around, and you'll also be shown animations depicting what must have happened, you don't have to watch people be decapitated, or have their throats slit, or anything else truly violent - instead, most of the violence is implied rather than explicit. Even the autopsies are pretty pedestrian, as you just rotate feature-less bodies to find red wounds. All things considered, it's probably less gory than the TV show.
NCIS: Based On The TV Series is a single player game and has no multiplayer modes at all.
Age Ratings
Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii
