The Nintendo DS has seen a number of unique titles with developers really using it as a test bed for ideas they probably have had kicking around their head for a while. One such popular series is Phoenix Wright, a game which places you in the role of a lawyer trying to defend various people. Coming from Japan, it was no surprise that this has some of the weirdest court cases around. However after three games the developer has decided that Mr Wright has defended enough court cases and it is time for a new young gun to hit the streets and that young gun is Apollo Justice. While the main character has changed, the gameplay has not which is either a good or bad thing depending on your view point. This is the first game in the series developed purely for the Nintendo DS - previous titles, while on DS, were primarily developer for the GBA in Japan.

As we said before, Phoenix Wright is known for some truly bizarre court cases and this doesn’t change with Apollo. Before the game is done you will be trying to find a young girl’s panties, investigating a mafia famil,y and even defending the famous Phoenix Wright himself for a crime. You may view that as a spoiler, but this actually serves as the tutorial of the game so you will be instantly into it. Unfortunately, the story itself can at times become very annoying. Once again the series decides that too much text is never enough and you will be constantly pressing the button to skip text, especially if you do not like convoluted stories of which this has many. We'd love to try this game on a real world lawyer to see just how far they get, because from what we can tell the stories just do not allow the actual action to correlate to actual attorney practices.

The gameplay itself has not changed one bit. You still challenge and object to particular statements in the court room and have to find inconsistencies with the witness testimony and evidence. To aid with this, you can also now re-create the crime scenes to help solve the cases. Also, the side missions are back where you have to investigate and adventure throughout the games world to find out information before each case begins. We don't like this because it takes you away from the court room action which is by far where the series shines, and some of the cases are so ridiculously stupid that the side missions are just plain annoying, but we do understand that this mixes the game up and keeps it a bit fresh rather than continuous court cases. To emphasise this, one of the new features is the ability to pick up when a witness is twitching or sweating in the stand. Once you learn this ability and know how to use it, picking up when they are lying becomes easier. It is not introduced until some way into the game however, and unfortunately many people will have switched off due to the repetitive nature by then.

One thing that becomes apparent when playing the game is that it’s a lot more like an adventure game. There will be times where you will have to talk to people to find out new information, investigate scenes, look specifically at pieces of evidence and then put it all together in the court case. This actually works quite well and despite the convoluted stories and repetitive nature of the game, the adventure style of the investigations does help to mix the gameplay up. There are four missions overall which may not seem like much, but aside from the first which acts as a tutorial, most take a significant amount of time and there are many opportunities for you to lose the case as well. When this happens you move back to the start of that session in court to try again.

The biggest innovation to the series, and quite frankly one that people who play on public transport could live without, is the ability to yell 'hold it' and 'objection' into the microphone. Thankfully this is not compulsory so it is entirely possible to play the game on the train. They have also expanded the scope of the games areas. Some require you to move across two screens to see the entire scene. However considering that this is the biggest new addition to the game, other than the main character changing, it is clear to see that the developers are running low on ideas for the series and having a new main character and voice ability is not enough to keep the series going. They really need to look at what makes the game popular and take it to the next level for the next game of which we are sure there is one in development.

Apollo Justice may just be a re-named Phoenix Wright but considering the old games were not broken and enjoyed much success, we can't blame the developers for not changing it. So it really comes down to whether you liked the older games or not. If not you won't find much new, if you did, then Apollo Justice will be right up your alley and is a moderately interesting addition to the series. However next time they will really need to change it up or Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice risk turning into yet another franchise which has gone on too long.