I felt, personally, that the game gets noticeably better once you finish the homicide cases and move on to vice.

I think I quit at the first homicide case, right after the final traffic case where the ridiculousness of the interrogation portion punched through the red zone.

According to Rockstar's online statistics it was the most failed case! (The Fallen Idol)

Somehow I succeeded at that case? I have no idea. I stopped during the first homicide case because I had a perfect run going and I didn't want to fuck it up

I've seen this game go by on the cheap on Steam. I think I'll keep letting it go by.

Yeah I picked it up during a sale and it feels like I paid for a tech demo.

Should also mention that all the gameplay flaws of a detective game would have been fine if the story was good.

I writing is probably on par with your average GTA game, but in a lot of places I'd say it's worse. Would you play GTA just for the story? You're given a completely flat protagonist who's supposed to be fleshed out in flashbacks but hell if I could find a reason to care about those scenes.

I really enjoyed LA Noire personally, but it's biggest flaw was that you honestly don't get many options in how you do your investigation. The game is cool in an old school graphic adventure sort of way, but it was too tethered by its format. The homicide cases are a glaring example of this. The entirety of the homicide storyline deals with basically a serial killer. It's not terribly well written and it gets a little weird for a game like this, I think, but that aside, it's entirely possible to deduce (as I did) who the killer is very early on in the storyline, and it's amazing they decided to not let you act on it and be a big hero. But the game isn't made that way. You have to play through each case, each mission, in order, in a specific way. In fact, one case late in the homicide story actually rewards you for being solved "correctly" (as all the cases do) even though the perfect rated solution to the case is, in fact, wrong and you're framing the wrong guy for the crime.
So, LA Noire's problem was really that it confused linear story telling arcs with solving cases, and thus every desk in the game (except traffic) all has some sort of unifying plot, which doesn't work in the end. That said, I think Team Bondi did good work and it's a shame that their studio was so badly mismanaged so as to destroy the chances of them doing another Rockstar collaboration.

I tried to enjoy this game, I really did. I dedicated a lot of time to it. But I slowly withdrew when I realized that every case boiled down to searching houses till the scary music stopped and getting the right answers on multiple choice quizzes. Oh, and not smashing the shit out of the city during chases. In at least one case I aced every single interrogation 100% and found every clue, but because I'd lost control of the car and flattened a bunch of trash cans and light poles during a chase, I got a poor star rating and a terrifying chewing out from my superior.

I never took any of the radio calls because I discovered that a lot of the case objectives are timed. Like if I didn't get to a restaurant fast enough a message would display at the end of a case saying something like "You would have found your culprit faster if you made better time getting to the restaurant." So yeah, the whole thing just became completely linear except for the shoot outs.

Or maybe I need to give it another go. I've been considering trading it in.

Plus the interrogation answers are always the same. One time I kept getting a wrong answer and I reset my Xbox until I finally landed on the right one.

I dunno. I got every case right, though I didn't care if I aced them or not. I really liked the game, but a lot of that is due to feel.

The homicide desk was rough, particularly the last case, which has you running around town like an asshole when you know exactly where to go and who the killer is from the beginning.

Vice got interesting, though, and they do FINALLY get to adding depth to Cole's character from that time on, but it's far too late in the story to finally make your protagonist interesting and so I don't blame people for falling off.

The plot changes nicely in the final act, during the arson desk cases but all swirls down to finding what is basically a signed confession tying up every case you've had so far (except, oddly, the homicide desk cases, which are like this side story).

And yes, the story is too linear. The whole thing was a step in the right direction, proper police procedural show format instead of slider puzzles and inventory combinations, but with that should come dynamism and freedom, not slavishly following a set plot line, or even if you want to have that overarching character plot, make the cases disconnected enough that your choices actually matter. In a few cases, you have the choice to lock up on guy or the other, but in the end, it turns out neither of them did it because mystery man and it doesn't quite work.