Quit in the middle of The Fallen Idol case for now.
Driving tasks feel too simplistic so far, and other than to fill in the numbers for street cases and locations of interest for more experience points, I'm not sure why anyone would want to keep on driving themselves when they can just auto-drive with the partner as it can be annoying to work out the patterns and driving habits of the AI which seem oblivious to your car's presence until it's too late. Traffic feels too random (seems like almost every intersection a four-way stop despite what the lights can look like). On top of that, the feel of driving isn't particularly enjoyable.
Loads of on-foot chases. Maybe too many. Considering how limited in scope the action seems to be, at this point, I'm wondering if I won't be missing an option to auto-chase the fleeing person(s) sooner than later.
Fighting seems about the same as GTA IV and that means it's functional, but not much more.
Shooting is also plain and gets the job done, but the cover system and moving from place to place in a gunfight seems far too clunky and problematic in some of the street cases I've done so far. (Feels especially weak compared to Mafia II, which is hard to not compare to.) Hope that this doesn't become an issue later when things presumably get more complicated and/or difficult.
Scene investigation and clue/evidence gathering is a lot more simplistic and more vague than I was thinking it might be. I'd bother to type up my issues if I could articulate them better at the moment, but I'll say that I just don't feel like I'm discovering or detecting much that isn't blatantly thrown out there for me to see or having to simply luck into everything and only then finding what may be important because the game says it is. I know there's a limit to what is possible with the concept before it becomes unrealistic to produce and/or more tedious than real life investigations...but I was hoping for better suggestion in the related dialogue and case information that could lead me to follow a pattern of logic for looking for specific things without having it feeling so binary (obvious or very indistinct).
The interrogations and questioning scenes feel a bit too hit or miss mainly because there's only so much to do, similar to finding keywords in older graphic adventures based on conversations with other NPCs or finding new information tied to the clue-finding segments. Simple by limitation yet often annoyingly obtuse even with so little possible to see. Thanks to the quality of acting and the faces, the truth/doubt/lie decisions produces some of the funniest unintentional moments when the tone of the session turns on a dime, though.
The facial animation rocks even if it looks a bit creepy at times the way it tends to feel completely apart from the separately-captured body capture and performance. Visuals are very nice even if it does have some minor issues with framerate and IQ.
Soundtrack is motherfucking great. Dialogue and acting is, compared to 99% of other games, excellent and genuinely fun.
Even though they're different animals, this is more the direction where modern graphic action-adventures should be heading versus Heavy Rain's super-streamlined, always panicky experience. Holding a stick forward and steering myself during a chase is dead simple, but it's more satisfyingly involving than keeping up with a bunch of on-screen button and control prompts. Also, it definitely takes some thinking and deductive skill to play through some parts of even these early cases successfully.
Still, this seems like a heavily passive experience despite an increase in the need to pay attention to all of the dialogue and performances. Still, comes across as the best stab at the whole interactive movie thing, so far.