Ace Attorney Investigations Collection Review (PS4) | Push Square

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Ace Attorney games are traditionally composed of two types of gameplay. A crime is committed, and you investigate by collecting evidence, speaking to witnesses, and conferring with your partner. Then you go to court to defend your client by presenting evidence and finding contradictions in witness testimonies, before ultimately unravelling a usually complicated case in dramatic fashion at the last minute, wiping the smile off a smug prosecutor's face in the process.

The courtroom drama is — as an early 2000s Z-list celebrity on MTV Cribs might say — where the magic happens. The investigation sections are just the paperwork you've got to file in order to get to the main event. And so an Ace Attorney game purely about investigations without ever having your day in court sounds like a tough sell. On paper it's a bit like an Uncharted game entirely about Nathan Drake making his way to the airport to go on a globe-trotting adventure that happens off-screen.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection comprises two spin-offs to the main series, both of which completely eschew courtroom hijinks in favour of good old fashioned detective work. They work better than you might think. There's Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit, both originally released on Nintendo DS, with Prosecutor's Gambit never having made its way to the West before.

The gameplay in both titles is basically identical, save for a couple of new mechanics added to Prosecutor's Gambit. You control Miles Edgeworth, who Ace Attorney fans will remember as being a smug prosecutor often locking horns with Phoenix Wright in the original Ace Attorney game. As Miles, you peruse crime scenes, speaking with witnesses, collecting evidence, forming hypotheses by joining disparate clues together, and finally, bring villains to justice by building irrefutable cases against them.

These are classic point-and-click adventure games at heart, and while some later puzzles