Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law is an animated interactive adventure game that merges the fun and mayhem of the Adult Swim TV show with a unique style of gameplay. Players will step into the shiny wingtips of Harvey Birdman, a third-rate superhero turned third-rate defense attorney charged with exonerating parodied classic cartoon characters. Over the course of the game, players must guide Harvey through a series of odd and comical cases. Each of the game's five interactive stories takes the winged crusader of justice to familiar locations from the TV show. In order to prove his client's innocence, Harvey must peruse the scene of the crime, gather evidence, talk with other cartoon characters, occasionally have drinks with opposing council, and tear holes-no matter how ridiculous-in the testimony provided by the witness for the prosecution. Harvey must bring the whole story together to defend his client in a court where anything can happen...including a confrontation with the prosecution who brandishes a Shrink Ray Gun. With outrageous game play and the comical antics of animated characters, players and fans alike will feel that they are not just taking control of a character, but actually taking part in a brand new episode of Harvey Birdman.
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'The Burning Question' is clearly the weakest of the interactive episodes and each episode gradually gets better and better. Though, honestly, if 'Personal Piracy' were an episode of the series, it would be one of the show's finest episodes. It's incredibly well written, satirical, and comedically on point.
As for whether or not this works as a game or not is another story. It's interactive, sure, but it doesn't feel like it uses the medium to its full potential, hence the lukewarm rating. In addition, some of the connections between the evidence and the case are obtuse and questionable.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a good time while playing it. It was a lot of fun.
What keeps this game afloat is the humor. It is what you would expect from the show of the same name, although Colbert being absent is slightly noticeable even though the stand in imo does a good job impersonating him.
This game is also extremely short. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing is up to your discretion. The whole game is about as long as one Phoenix Wright case despite that it's divided into several cases. You can easily breeze through this game in one sitting in under 3 hours.
Whelp before I got around to playing it there was an update that stopped the Free Loader from working and so I didn't get a chance to play it and I've never seen it available in Australia.
Anyway, after years of beating Phoenix Wright, I felt like it was time to take on the birdman. I finally managed to play it (admittingly through emulation) and yeah, it's good.
It takes Phoenix's gameplay and slaps it into Harvey's world, but all of the scenes are animated and the tone is more akin to Birdman's. There's little tension in the game, only presenting evidence during a trial seems to loose you any crests, which is a good thing too given that much of the fun of the game is from seeing what happens if you say something ridiculous... usually during those parts you can select another option until you get the correct one (and so the challenge is identifying the right response and picking that one last).
There are sections of the game where I had to visit each place to try and find where the next cut scene was and two times where it was a case of present everything in every room to figure out what was required (though once I felt dumb not realising what it wanted).
The story's are mmm..... like the show and there are good jokes in there.
But it's probably not worth rushing out to get.