PETER HOSKIN reviews The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (PlayStation, Switch, PC, £32.99)

Verdict: Legal eagle

Rating:

OBJECTION! Actually, sorry, I don’t mean that. It’s just that the word is etched on my brain after a week spent playing The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.

The characters bark it at each other — along with others, like ‘Take that!’ and ‘Shut up!’ — as they proceed through a set of courtroom dramas that are almost literally comic book-y. Your job is to read along and try to solve the case by presenting just the right pieces of evidence at the right time.

Big In Japan! The Ace Attorney series has been huge in Japan for a couple of decades, with lagging but growing popularity in the West

The Ace Attorney series has been huge in Japan for a couple of decades, with lagging but growing popularity in the West. Chronicles brings together two titles that had previously only been released in their homeland, several years ago, and translates them both to modern consoles and into English.

What distinguishes Chronicles from the rest of the series is its setting: 19th-century (rather than modern-day) Japan, with some time spent Sherlock Holmes-ing it up in Britain.

It’s a great choice visually, but also thematically: the game’s heroes are grappling with the law and new forms of detection as the world around them does likewise.

But Chronicles’ finest qualities are those it shares with other Ace Attorney games. Its characters are funny and richly drawn. Each of the ten cases is imaginative and adds to something larger. The music is as propulsive as a steam train.

I played Chronicles on my PlayStation, but suspect it will be even better on the portable Switch. Bring it to the beach, like a tattered Agatha Christie paperback, and get solving. No objections here.

Imagine Earth (Xbox, PC, £20.99)

Verdict: Green and pleasant

Rating:

EARLIER this month, Imagine Earth came to Xbox after a long spell on the PC. It’s one of those planetary management games in which you build colonies, trade resources, repel enemies, and bask in your own omnipotence.

It’s certainly likeable — not least because of its beautiful graphics and heart-on-sleeve environmentalism — but it doesn’t do much to shake up the genre. I’m afraid I ended up imagining different earths, in different games