L.A. Noire: review

• Format: 360 (version reviewed), PS3
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Developer: Team Bondi
• Players: 1
• Site: http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/

With the backing of Rockstar, Australian developer Team Bondi set out to make a different kind of game. Drawing from stylistic detective and gangster movies of yesteryear and boasting revolutionary facial animation, does L.A. Noire earn a commendation or does it deserve to sleep with the fishes?

Set in 1940s Los Angeles, L.A. Noire places you in the role of Cole Phelps, a decorated war hero making his way up through the ranks of the LAPD. Players achieve this by getting involved in crime scenes, looking for clues, piecing together puzzles, tailing people, interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects.

It would be a mistake to approach L.A. Noire expecting an experience similar to anything else backed or produced by Rockstar. Though it may look and play like a GTA game (with its open world setting, gunplay, tedious collectable hunting and minimal optional extras), Noire is very different.

Most of Noire will have you involved in the various steps of investigation, with the interviews and interrogations being the key selling points due to the aforementioned facial animation technology. Boasting the ability to accurately capture an actor’s face (if by accurate they meant everyone looking like they have a lisp) the game expects you to watch their reaction to Cole’s questions and thus be able to guess whether or not they are telling the truth. The doubt option is particularly vague, and can at times have totally random outcomes. Optional musical chimes will tell you if you have guessed correctly (though you can guess by what is said either way).

Unfortunately there are problems with this questioning system, beyond the obvious flaw of instantly telling you whether you were right or wrong, and this is just the first of many things which will slowly eat away at the enjoyment you will have with this game.

The first problem is that accusing somebody of lying is only successful if you have proof to back it up (realistic at least); but there are times when you have multiple pieces of evidence which, while all circumstantial when separate, prove absolute guilt when combined. The game does not allow you to do this and forces you to guess which it wants you to pick. There is no game over for going down the wrong route in a conversation and things will play out differently based on what happens, but it is incredibly frustrating when you are not at fault.

There are also ridiculous accusations of murder thrown about by Cole if you spot a provable lie of minor importance. The game cannot tell the difference between you believing someone to be a liar and believing that they are a murderer. It feels as if Team Bondi has assumed that the player is unintelligent, to be blunt.

The worst crime occurs during the homicide cases when a string of murders happen under the same circumstances. It is infuriatingly obvious even within the first case that a serial killer is getting away with murder and that you are going after the wrong people, yet the game arrogantly thinks it has fooled you – culminating in one of the most boring climaxes to a plot we have ever seen. It even goes one step further by lying to the player. Cutscenes at the start of the homicide cases show the murder happening and go so far as to use character models of suspects within the case carrying out the kill, even though it later retroactively changes the continuity of this to nobody’s surprise.

Another major gripe is in the replay option. There is no harm in getting through a crime scene or a questioning session without being perfect; however those who want to strive to get perfect five star ratings without resorting to following a guide will be the most frustrated of all.

Noire uses a similar checkpoint system to GTA IV, yet it only applies if you die or otherwise do something that utterly ruins the case (kill a hostage by mistake for example) yet there is no option to reload a checkpoint if you want to try again at correctly spotting all lies. The game expects you to restart the whole case if you want to do this and of course even if you get through the interview you messed up there might be more within the same case you weren’t sure about. It becomes an endeavour into punishing trial and error, the game presumably (wrongly) assuming that you will enjoy constantly restarting when trying for perfection.

We would be less harsh on the core mechanics of Noire if it had something else to fall back on, but all there is is a limited range of very repetitive, short cases that are spread across all desks which you will not be inclined to replay. The one area it shines in is the voice work which, for the most part, is stellar.

L.A. Noire succeeds only at failing to achieve almost everything it attempts to do. We applaud the concept but scorn the outcome. The core mechanics are flawed, the slow pacing and predictability of the plot remove any momentum to push you towards the end, and the bottom line is that there is not enough to do and what is there just isn’t interesting enough.

If you are looking for a superior lie-spotting, crime-solving experience we would recommend the Phoenix Wright games (not that they are flawless by any means). If you don’t mind a game which thinks you’re unintelligent and has very little to do in it, then by all means buy L.A. Noire.