Other than sharing its premise, the app Lie to Me has nothing to do with the Fox drama series of the same name, so downloaders looking for Tim Roth and Kelli Williams should move along.
Lie to Me (99 cents) bills itself as a training app to develop a user’s ability to read a person’s emotions via microexpressions and microgestures. However, the app is a game miscategorized in lifestyle. As James Bond (yes, really), your task is to look at photos of people in their natural state. Each photo switches to the subject displaying an microexpression for a split second, and then you have to choose the corresponding emotion. Get it right and you continue on, but miss six and you fail.
The app claims to have more than 25 different characters, but after playing arcade mode extensively and completing the first 12 levels of campaign mode, I know I didn’t see anywhere near that many individuals.
The app doesn’t really explain what users should look for or how to discern microexpressions, so it’s really more a massive memory game rather than an actual training tool. Plus, the app deviates from the standard emotions of disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and contempt. (Spoiler alert: In this app, amused really means surprised, scared is more akin to startled and if the subject’s tongue is sticking out it means they are crazy.)
