Law & Order: Legacies

When Richard Wolf (the system will not allow me to say ****) created Law & Order we're pretty sure that he was not anticipating a show that would, over the course of its twenty years on TV make so many "firsts" lists that they almost had to change the name of the "First in TV" book to the "Law & Orders in TV"...

Seriously - the show was the longest-running prime-time crime drama ever, tied with Gunsmoke as the longest running live-action show ever, tied with X-Files for introducing new conspiracy theories to the public (take THAT Internet!), and as for spin-offs, check this impressive list out:

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
  
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent
  
• Law & Order: Trial by Jury
  
• Law & Order: LA
  
• Law & Order: UK
  
• Paris enquêtes criminelles
  
• Think Russian for "Law & Order"
  
• Think Russian for "Law & Order: SVU"
  
• Exiled: A Law & Order Movie
  

In the world of Video Games there are:

Law & Order: Dead on the Money (2002 Legacy Interactive / Windows PC & Mac OSX)
Law & Order: Double or Nothing (2003 Legacy Interactive / Windows PC)
Law & Order: Justice is Served (2004 Legacy Interactive / Windows PC)
Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2005 Legacy Interactive / Windows PC)

The premise of the show is simple enough - they rip a crime right out of the headlines, put up a notice saying that the story is completely fictional and has no relation whatsoever with anything you might have read in the paper, and then the first half of the show depicts the work of the police in the process of investigating the crime, while the second half depicts the work of the DA's office in the prosecution of the crime.

Thanks to several factors -- the presence of Superhero and Genius Detective John Munch, who told the truth better than Mulder ever could -- and the presence of this spiffy Clang sound that sort of goes "chung CHUNG!" whenever anything interesting happens, the show was a brilliant success.


Once it paid its dues with around 20 years on TV it earned the right to become a video game - which as any consumer of entertainment products knows is the greatest honor any TV show can hope for.

In the case of Law & Order: Legacies what we get is a series of crimes that we have pleasure of solving that follows the format of the show - the first half being detective work, the second being the part where we use brilliant legal strategies to convict the totally guilty buggers!


Created by game studio Telltale Games (best known for The Walking Dead series, CSI series, Sam & Max series - the list goes on!) for iOS, Windows, and OSX, it is the iOS version that we are concerned with and that this guide is primarily written for.

Created as a graphic adventure that, like the four previous games in the series, uses the episodic format (there are seven episodes in total for Legacies' first season), the game includes all of the popular characters from the franchise.

It offers a witty somewhat challenging and certainly entertaining game play experience for mobile gaming, having been engineered to fully support that platform through the use of predictive saves that allow for game play in bite-sized chunks.


It makes use of a detectives notebook which records the conversations, interviews, and any clues you might have found, which allows the player to dip in and out of the game as often as they like or need to, but can also be enjoyed in big chunks.

The game is sold as episodes, which cost $2.99 each (but gamers can buy the first episode for $2.99 and then purchase a package of the remaining six episodes for $12.99 saving themselves $5 off of the total individual purchase price).