If you love to play a game where you will be spending more time on Google or looking up strategy guides vs actually exploring the game you're playing, Chinatown Detective Agency is a game made for you.

A futuristic Singapore is the setting and it starts off pretty good, but quickly the game loop is uncovered and the game's charming look and interesting location go right out the window.

The game is largely puzzle solving and trying to figure out where to go next. The only problem is that the actual game only provides you with hints and clues and there's no real way to uncover some of these puzzles without being really knowledgeable on a lot of various things or to constantly be Googling quotes, flags, languages, capitals, and a few other topics.

The game doesn't provide you any way of discovering these in game. You either look them up or pay someone in the game to give you the answer. There's the option to get a hint, which also costs money, but it's a waste of time to do.

You can't really just fly/look around until you come up to the place/solution too since some clues have to be manually types out and traveling costs money. The game also features a fun rent system where, at the start of every month, you have to pay your bills. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

If you run out of money or get trapped/arrested/fail the puzzle, you get a game over and you will restart from the beginning of the case more times than not. The game features an auto save feature that almost always only works at the beginning of the case. You can't save yourself at any time, so if you're worried about running out of money flying around and discovering the next location and want to save so you don't have to go through all the dialogue you've already read, too bad.

Flying around and seeing the various dystopian locations is neat but they are completely empty with nothing to explore besides the screen you will load up when you "land". Most areas that are not necessary to the story are empty husks. Some times new areas will open up if they are story related but I rarely visited most of the locations in the one storyline path I took.

The game provides you with three different clients to work with. At the start, you can work with all three to help get an idea for the case and the story. Eventually though, you will have to pick one to work full time which will ignore the rest of the cases. I only played through one path, so it's possible that these other areas are explored more in other pathways but it just feels like a lot of wasted space.

I played the XBox version of this game as well and there are issues with the console version of this compared to the PC version. Since you have no mouse, you aren't able to just click on the thing you want to interact with, so you'll have to rely on the game automatically hovering over the correct item/person, which this game struggles to do.

So many times I was standing right of front of something but the game instead was focusing on me interacting with something behind me or nearby. There was also a very frustrating puzzle involving getting out of a trap by solving constellations (another Google focused puzzle for me). Getting through the puzzle wasn't too bad, except for the auto focusing. Since two of the puzzles were right next to each other (one was above, the other below it), I was unable to easily click on the final part of the puzzle. After dying twice and having to get back there, I got lucky finally by just pressing A until it recognized the bottom puzzle. I almost quit then and there.

There are other bugs as well, characters just not appearing, or not being able to talk to them, or other various in game issues that just make the whole experience worse. Things where it wasn't as simple as leaving and coming back. Things where I had to literally shut the game down and start from the beginning of the case.

This game has an interesting location, mainly taking place in a futuristic Singapore and the idea could have been good but Chinatown Detective Agency falls well short of being worth your time unless the idea of Google searching your way into progress sounds like a great time