Hollywood Crimes is a decent enough puzzle game with some weird structure and repetition. Billed as a puzzle game with a murderous plot, you find yourself as the newest contestant contestant on the popular "The Incredible Puzzle Masters". The thing is, previous winners are being killed off and your friend in the FBI has asked for your help in solving the puzzles that the killer has left behind.

The game is more or less structured into two parts: one half sees you solving puzzles for the game show, earning enough points by choosing and solving puzzles from a given list. Once you pass a certain number of points for the round, you move on. The story puzzles are a little different: first, you can't choose which ones you do, and second, they're a lot less 'structured' than the puzzles in the game show. You won't be moving little squiggly worms around a board for the killer, though don't expect any levels of gore or what have you.

The puzzles themselves are pretty basic, though some tend to get pretty inventive with how they work. Sliding rings, moving worms around a field, making a path from a pattern of colored lights, that sort of thing. There's a lot of repetition, however, and you'll find numerous iterations of the same kinds of puzzles cropping up, making them feel pretty lacking in the originality department. And though some puzzles are fun to work through, most are just the kinds that you've seen in puzzle books and stocking stuffer-type packages, things you've done before. They're just not very exciting to work out, unlike, say, Professor Layton.

If you're looking for more puzzles, you can always either replay those you've done before, or read fan mail. This mail, earned by getting points in the game show, is often full of fluff information ("Oh I love you on the show", and so forth), but sometimes contains puzzles to solve. You also get hints for story puzzles by solving these, so it's in your best interest to do so - if you need the help, that is.

The story itself is fairly uninteresting, despite its premise. Told through cutscenes of cut-out characters (literally) and static screens, the idea is there, but it lacks in pacing. Going from solving murder mysteries to a game show is jarring, and just takes you out of any attempt at atmosphere that the game has built up. It doesn't really use much of the 3DS's capabilities (beyond the camera) either, despite the obvious uses that 3D could have in rotational puzzles.

Hollywood Crimes falls short of what it's trying to do. The puzzles aren't very interesting, the story isn't compelling at all, and there's no real pull to move forward, either to the next game show event, murder scene, or story scene. There are better puzzle games for fans of the genre, better stories to be told, better games to play.

For the context of this review, the platform primarily tested was the Nintendo 3DS release of the game.

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