It was a real surprise when I heard this game was being re-released. Is this game what people have been asking for? This is what people want Rockstar to be pouring their resources into?
When this game was first announced, I drank the kool aid. I love the early 20th century setting in entertainment; movies depicting this era automatically gets a few extra points from me. Upon hearing about a game that lets you become a detective from this era, I was instantly sold. With advanced motion capture techniques and revolutionary gameplay involving responding to emotive facial animations for interrogations, I was even more excited. I picked up the game on release day for the 360 and finished it in a few sessions. And to be honest, it was a complete let down.
As others have noted, the interrogations, which was one of the big selling points of this game, did not hit the mark. As a player, the options I chose and how I thought Cole would interact with suspects were always out of line with how Cole really responded to them. This made interrogations feel like a gamble and I felt instantly disconnected with this part of the game. The rest of the game was also a disappointment. As a cop, you had to do things like chase down suspects, respond to 911 calls and investigate crime scenes. Chasing down suspects was repetitive and rudimentary, but it was one of my more memorable aspects of the game. It was probably the only thing in the game that I felt like I knew what I was doing and I was good at it. A selling point of responding to 911 calls was that if you were fast enough the scene would play out differently. You drive like a maniac, arrive early to catch the bad guys in the act and then a fire fight ensued. There were obstacles to making this fun. To begin, driving sucked. Someone mentioned they always let their partner drive; I did the same. It was really difficult to get there on time because driving well was difficult and, also, it was hard to navigate with the map to find the quickest path. Even if you did all that, why did you want to? The game played out almost identically whether you made it there on time or not. You don't arrest anyone and potentially get more information, you just got more dead bodies. Finally, investigating crime scenes was basically a point and click adventure game. Every scene had certain points of interest, you walked over to them and examined them. Searching bodies was much the same thing, you had certain parts of the body to look at and you could just cycle through them until you hit every point and discovered everything there was to see.
My memories of this game revolves largely around disappointment, so I was really shocked to see this was being re-released. But there seems to be a lot of people on this forum that were really looking forward to this and have had a good time. That's great. I want to ask, if you had never played this game during its original release, heard about this re-release and was excited for it, what were you expecting? The luke-warm reception of this game originally is documented on the internet. So, what was enough to get you excited? Did the game deliver? Is the game better simply because it does not have the massive hype machine behind it from the original release?
