I'm roughly halfway through this game, and while I really like what they're trying to do with it and I enjoy a breath of originality amidst a billion cover based shooters, the gameplay can, as Russ Pitts put it in his review, frequently piss me right the fuck off. It's the worst kind of annoyance because you can see the potential, but it never quite reaches it.
I couldn't really care less about the shooting and driving mechanics; I'm prepared to suffer through their vagrancies if I can get to some serious detective work. But the clue gathering mechanic and the interviews, which should be the meat and bones of the game, are seriously underwhelming. You find so much evidence that you never.ever.use, and once you realise that only a magic handful of the supposed 'clues' are going to come up in interviews, you stop paying attention to their particular nuances and just let the game hold your hand the whole way. And the interviewing - oh, the interviewing. I agree with everything Yahtzee has said here, but moreover, I'd like to add that the truth/doubt/lie system is completely wasted in this game because it's either piss easy or ridiculously hard. And we're not talking hard because you run into any super-skilled actors, it's hard because you sit there trying to figure out what kind of logic was running through the writer's head when they penned this script.
Honestly, half the time you're not trying to figure out whether what the person has said is true or not: you're trying to figure out which way they programmed Cole to get the information. Sometimes he will use 'truth' to get more information out of people in the exact same manner as he uses 'doubt'. Sometimes he'll completely change his bloody question during 'lie', which leaves me wondering 'am I saying their response to the first question is a lie, or the second one?' And the choice of evidence you use to prove them wrong is sometimes ridiculous. For example: Cole asks a guy if anyone would want to harm his wife. He says no. I went through doubt and truth and both times got them wrong, so I reloaded and hit lie. Suddenly Cole is accusing him of using rope from his boat to strangle her. What.The.Hell. Completely different question! At no point have you come across any motive for the husband to kill her, much less have any evidence to support that motive.
It's such a shame, because otherwise this could be one of the best games I have ever played.