Ambitious, but ultimately repetitive and not much fun. Another overhyped game focused on looks and an uncohesive story.
After playing you will realize this is due to there not being much gameplay. What is there is pretty repetitive. Car chases, brief shootouts, or chasing someone on foot is all thats here outside of the investigations and interrogations.
I expected this though. like I said they really tried to push the face tech gimmick and interrogations as being a big deal. But the interrogations are actually pretty repetitive in themself.
You watch for 3 basic things to see if theyre being dishonest. Shifty eye movement, deep swallowing, or if they cringe their mouth a bit. But even if you know they are lying you still need to use the correct evidence as proof.
This is where it fumbles. You can have multiple pieces of evidence that prove the same thing, yet its really a guess as to which one will be accepted as the correct one. Even with a mountain of evidence you might not be able to prove a thing because its hard to understand the right way of using the certain evidence they want you to use. It is clunky.
As far as investigating goes, it is pretty lackluster as well. You can choose to have hints given when you are near clues or not. But at times it is necessary because you would have no way of knowing a brick in a wall is loose etc by just using your own eyes.
Also it is too hard to see all items laying around. You eventually just learn to walk around tapping 'A' until you get lucky and pick something up to look at. Many times you will be flat stumped and will get no help.
It is an interesting idea but not done very well at all.
Another main point to this game is the story. There is alot of dialogue in this game but it doesnt make much difference. After playing for hours all the multiple twists and turns become dull and predictable and the story becomes convoluted and makes no sense.
The war flashbacks that Cole has are uninteresting and also arent very interesting or make you care much. It would have been more interesting if you actually played in them, but you do not. Actually they seem to do their best to make you hate Cole Phelps. He is odd and seems to put himself on a pedestal throughout the game.
The realistic faces do help a tad to make you care about the characters. But by the end of the game you dislike Cole so much you dont care what happens to him.
The driving and shooting mechanics are decent but could have used a bit more polish. Also you get no new weapons and mainly stick to your pistol throughout the whole game with the occasional tommy gun or shotgun for a few seconds.
Also with the extra attention to facial detail it becomes apparent how odd the regularly animated bodies look connected to them. Everyones heads look huge sitting on top of thin bodies.
Overall I would say the game does a few things right and does have nice facial animation and captures a accurate realistic LA. Yet there is so little to do, with the story lacking cohesion there just isnt much reason to buy the game. One play through and youll be done. So I would say to at least give it a rent when you have a weekend with nothing to do.