Man, I am loving this game. It strikes just about every chord you could want from a detective game.
Graphically the game is a mixed bag, inside environments and the character models are solid, but animations tend to be stiff and the outside environments are fairly dreadful. It gets the job done though, and looks markedly better comparatively than previous Frogwares Holmes games.
With that out of the way let's talk about the gameplay. Finally a detective game that will let you fail. I don't mean you can miss something and get a game over screen, I mean you can just get everything flat out wrong and the game just doesn't care. You're still wrong, but the game won't tell you unless you ask (there is an option to reveal if your choice was right and how many clues you gathered of the total).
The way the game works is you are presented with a scene and start gathering clues, questioning witnesses, etc. Then you can bring up a deduction screen, in this you are presented facts about the case and, if two match up, you make a node on another screen that helps you create a kind of flowchart of the crime. On these nodes you can get different interpretations, for instance in one of the cases you had a guy act crazy and you find out he was on medication for depression that could make someone hallucinate if they took more than prescribed. This created a node where you could say he was crazy despite the meds and the stress of the situation just made him crazier, or you could decide he was just a well meaning guy who had taken too much medication and it made him a little loopy is all. The game is fine either way, you just have to decide based on everything else what is going on.
You can get some really wide ranging conclusions, my last case was a murder and there were 3 suspects and you could, even after collecting all the evidence, that each of them was the murderer with 2 different weapons, so six choices. There were six perfectly acceptable conclusions, but only one was right and not just arbitrarily right because of the game, if you get it wrong you forgot to take everything into consideration. That case took some serious thinking before it clicked and I realized the important clue. The game doesn't hold your hand through the whole thing, it holds it enough so you always know what you need to do, but the conclusions are all on you and I love that.
The game has a moral choice at the end of each case, but it's really a throwaway at this point. It might have a reason for being at the end, but right now it's a throwaway choice.
There is also the rare sequence where you have a physical action, and they are OK but not completely necessary since you can skip them. They aren't bad, I've seen worse, but they aren't great either.
Not sure I'd pay $60 for it, but it's a solid $30 game or rental. If you were really disappointed with the way LA Noire handled the detective work, give it a shot.
Graphically the game is a mixed bag, inside environments and the character models are solid, but animations tend to be stiff and the outside environments are fairly dreadful. It gets the job done though, and looks markedly better comparatively than previous Frogwares Holmes games.
With that out of the way let's talk about the gameplay. Finally a detective game that will let you fail. I don't mean you can miss something and get a game over screen, I mean you can just get everything flat out wrong and the game just doesn't care. You're still wrong, but the game won't tell you unless you ask (there is an option to reveal if your choice was right and how many clues you gathered of the total).
The way the game works is you are presented with a scene and start gathering clues, questioning witnesses, etc. Then you can bring up a deduction screen, in this you are presented facts about the case and, if two match up, you make a node on another screen that helps you create a kind of flowchart of the crime. On these nodes you can get different interpretations, for instance in one of the cases you had a guy act crazy and you find out he was on medication for depression that could make someone hallucinate if they took more than prescribed. This created a node where you could say he was crazy despite the meds and the stress of the situation just made him crazier, or you could decide he was just a well meaning guy who had taken too much medication and it made him a little loopy is all. The game is fine either way, you just have to decide based on everything else what is going on.
You can get some really wide ranging conclusions, my last case was a murder and there were 3 suspects and you could, even after collecting all the evidence, that each of them was the murderer with 2 different weapons, so six choices. There were six perfectly acceptable conclusions, but only one was right and not just arbitrarily right because of the game, if you get it wrong you forgot to take everything into consideration. That case took some serious thinking before it clicked and I realized the important clue. The game doesn't hold your hand through the whole thing, it holds it enough so you always know what you need to do, but the conclusions are all on you and I love that.
The game has a moral choice at the end of each case, but it's really a throwaway at this point. It might have a reason for being at the end, but right now it's a throwaway choice.
There is also the rare sequence where you have a physical action, and they are OK but not completely necessary since you can skip them. They aren't bad, I've seen worse, but they aren't great either.
Not sure I'd pay $60 for it, but it's a solid $30 game or rental. If you were really disappointed with the way LA Noire handled the detective work, give it a shot.
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