Got this game as part of the bundle for my PS3, and from the good reviews, I thought it would be a good game, especially since it's published from Rockstar. It also offered something different in terms of game play, where you're supposed to find clues and solve cases. This all sound great in theory, but the execution just isn't that great. I'm going to be honest, I didn't like the game, and I'll tell you the reasons why. It's a very repetitive game, the process of finding clues was all good for the first few cases or so, but by the time you've finished your first ten cases (21 in total), you're already sick of what you have to do. You know what to expect, and it doesn't help that the latter ones can take over an hour to complete (some even two hours, the earlier ones take around thirty mins). Basically, the gist of it is that you go to a crime scene, walking around waiting for your controller to vibrate to 'find' the clues, pick it up and jiggle the analogue stick until the character says something, then you question suspects, before moving onto the next scene. More often than not, once you arrive at the next scene, a person will run away and you'll either have to chase them by foot or a car. Then begins the whole process again with the questioning and clue finding. If you're lucky, you might have a gun fight but that's rare in the story cases.
Like I said, it was good for the first few cases, but that same repetitive formula gets really stale and I had to force myself to finish the game, it was more a chore than anything. If you're hoping for a good mystery though, you can forget it. Most of the cases are boring, you simply don't care what's going on, since you feel so detached anyway. There's one during the middle of the game where it's supposed to be a big reveal of a serial killer, but I couldn't be bothered figuring out the clue, and when the killer was revealed to be apparently someone I should have seen before, I was struggling to remember when (it was a random one-off encounter in one of the earlier cases), so much for the big plot twist. The game doesn't offer much variety in terms of side quests, you only get the 'street crimes', in which there are miniature 2-5 mins cases. It's something when I tell you that I enjoyed the street crimes more than the story cases themselves. Plus, when you're driving, you're not supposed to break any laws or crash, otherwise you get penalised in the final rating, you can't pull out your gun whenever you feel like it. Sure, all this is understandable since your character is a police officer, but it just makes for very boring and restrictive game play.
There were a few better parts in which I did enjoy myself, I was very glad when I got off the homicide cases as they were a trudge to get through, and the first vice case was interesting enough (until it got boring again at the end of the case and into the next one). The final three cases were interesting, a lot of action, and I liked how it tied to events from five (or so) cases before it. In regards to the main character, Coles, he is an okay guy, not someone you can sympathise with (especially after the events in Vice, which was kinda like wtf to me). His back story was frankly, quite bad. After every case, a clip shows but it feels so disjointed, and the subject matter so unrelated, that you don't care. The map is huge, it will take you more than ten mins just to drive from one end of the map to the other, but it isn't all good, since if you're not paying attention, everything just looks like the same. The graphics isn't too great either, and the whole facial capture thing, like other aspects, it sounded great, but in practice when you're playing the game, after the first few times, you don't notice it much anymore. There's no wit required here, it's not satisfying when you managed to shake something out of the suspect, coz everything's going to turn out right whatever you do, you don't have control. There's a ton of swearing in the game, every single person will swear, it is unnecessary and frankly, just over the top. Like I said, the best parts were the gun fights, but only because it got a bit more exciting, clue finding got boring very quickly and the stories isn't that great. I'd say, play this game only if you like this sort of stuff.
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