Quite Boring & Unorginal
Customer Rating: 
Art of Murder: FBI Confidential looks intriguing, but fails to entertain as a modern, 3rd person point-and-click game.
The main character's voice acting is horrible, trying to be funny in spots where it more inappropriate and annoying than laughable. She is a wimpy female character with poor detective skills. As the player, I felt I knew more about crime scenes than her. She repeats herself to often, makes incoherent sentences, and states that a bag of drugs is a "very useful thing" and a bronze statue head is "irreplaceable equipment." Um...okaaay.
The plot, involving ritualistic murders and the ancient Incan civilization has been used so many times that I found the story quite boring and uninteresting.
The only points I did like about the game were the nice graphics and sound. Since this game is quite shorter than other games of its genre, that made it easier for me to finish it without giving up on ever finding out what happens to the characters. That being said, the ending was unsatisfying.
I highly recommend a 3rd person game like Still Life or Black Mirror instead of this game. For something less macabre, try The Longest Journey or the Runaway games.
Wasted Potential
Customer Rating: "The Art of Murder: FBI Confidential" is a game with plenty of potential, but it never lives up to its promise. You play as Nicole Bonnet, a rookie FBI agent who is assigned to a series of grisly homicides in New York City. It seems like the point-and-click adventure format would be perfect for this kind of investigation, but the game undercuts this at every turn. There are several reports, including blood tests and dental records, but the player is never allowed to actually look at them. There are also chemical tests which involve nothing more than sticking a sample in a test tube and waiting for the answer to magically appear on-screen. Even the dialogue has been simplified; there are no dialogue trees and no choices for what to say to the other characters. This is a detective game that eliminates all the actual detection.
Puzzles range from easy to frustratingly illogical. One puzzle involves combining inventory items to fix a cell phone. Unfortunately, this task can only be performed by placing the items on a teeny-tiny hotspot which suddenly appears on your desk, and there is absolutely nothing to warn players that this is the case. There's also at least one puzzle where you can (and probably will) die, though fortunately the game autosaves before this puzzle.
By far the biggest drawback to this game is Nicole herself. It's very hard to enjoy a game when you dislike the main character, and boy, did I dislike her. To begin with, Nicole is a weakling who runs like an idiot and complains that a ream of paper is too heavy (um, don't FBI agents have to go through training?). Plus, her voice acting is awful. The actress doesn't sound like she even understands her lines half the time. The one line where she shows real feeling, though, is when you try an incorrect combination, and then she sneers, "That was stupid." She says that a lot. Her other go-to phrase is "What would Nick [her partner] do?" and since the game actually goes to elaborate lengths to keep you from meeting Nick, that's a super-annoying question. Frankly, I don't know what Nick would do unless it involves skipping work again, and that doesn't help me solve the puzzle.
As far as the plot goes, it is pretty easy to pick out the murderer, and then it's just a matter of waiting for Nicole to catch up with you. This is a short game (it took me about 8-9 hours), but it felt much longer, mostly because every plot twist is telegraphed far in advance. All in all, this is an uninspired game with a bad actress and a paint-by-numbers plot. You can do better than this game, and you probably should.
