L.A. Noire
Calling a Rockstar game overhyped is like saying the Pope's shit stinks. Nobody really likes to mention it, but, yeah, everybody knows it. For LA Noire, Rockstar's press and promo guys did a pretty good job of talking down the drive-and-shoot gameplay, and talking up the detective work and storytelling -- so it sucks that the cars handle like bricks, the collision physics clearly weren't well-tested, and the gunplay is somewhere between Red Dead Redemption and Dead Rising; but this is all somewhat expected. What's disappointing is that the detective work is insipid, and that the deficiencies of interrogation and decision-making really take away from the game's narrative heft.
LA Noire takes place in a sprawling city, and is full of street- and foot-traffic, but this is no GTA: the game is completely linear. Within a case there are some options as to what order you tackle leads in (and you can sometimes leapfrop leads altogether), but you go from case A to B to C, et al, with only cutscenes inbetween. For that matter, the choices within a case are... well, they aren't inconsequential. They can change how the case plays out. But it's hard to care when every situation that affords me multiple dialog options results in at least one out-of-order response -- that is, the witness or suspect, or even my character, says something that only has relevance to a question I haven't asked yet.
In Mass Effect I accept this because I can also shoot aliens with laser guns. In LA Noire, this is supposed to be, like, the thing. And it's a rookie implementation. Alpha Protocol does better at it. Seriously.
Speaking of Mass Effect, the dialog options in LA Noire are also frustratingly vague and/or misleading. When a person of interest responds to a question, you have the option to accept their answer, doubt it (like Phoenix Wright's "press"), or straight-up accuse them of lying and present evidence to prove it. Generally the distinction between the doubt and lie options is flaky at best, and frequently the accept option leads to an exchange that seems more like doubt. Choosing a "wrong" option costs you information, which can usually be worked around with alternate leads; but it's incredibly irritating to be docked performance points, not for failing to understand the case and its participants, but for failing to understand the precise instruction the game wants you to input.
Investigation, the part in which you find clues, is basically a non-thing. More often than not, interactive objects are visually indistinct from the environment, and most of those objects aren't relevant to the investigation. So you're just walking around the crime scene, waiting for the controller to rumble, and pressing A to see if it's worthwhile. I'd hesitate to call it an annoyance, since it's such a simple system, but it's definitely not a meaningful feature.
So those things - the investigation and interrogation - are what I expected LA Noire to really "wow" me with, and they absolutely haven't. The mechanics are still very playable, and not particularly subpar. But not what they should be, when they're the main selling points of a triple-A game that's seven years in development. Not even close.
As for the facial expressions: eh. In the right light, with the right expression, they can look very convincing. In other circumstances, they can look very awkward. Lips, in particular, tend to be jarring in motion, and body movement is no better than it was in GTA 4. Bondi's facial capture system is technologically impressive, and it does a good job of showing the characters' facial cues, but it's definitely several generations away from something that will really convince you the characters are real people.
Speaking of which, I think casting TV actors in so many key roles might have been a misstep. Cole Phelps is pretty good, and many of the other performances are great too, but there's more than a fair amount of phoning in; actors who clearly don't understand, or care, about the disassociative manner in which their lines will be played in the game.
So yeah. I can complain a lot about LA Noire. It simply doesn't live up to my expectations at all -- later, I'll elaborate about the visual performance, and the lackluster side-missions. That doesn't mean it isn't playable, nor that it's completely without merit: the premise of rising in the ranks of the LAPD, and the eventual process of unraveling each case's mysteries, are fairly satisfying. But I'm still waiting to be really impressed by the game.
Progress: Closed the Fallen Idol case