Review: L.A. Noire

The Big Takeaway: A new open world game from publisher Rockstar, with a moody 1940’s film noir bent.

The Little Takeaway: Linear to a fault, facial technology is great, but the bodies attached seem disassociated and polygonal in appearance. Disappointing final act.

Review:

Like the damaged dame that walks in to your private dick office, L.A. Noire has a lot of issues. The dame’s also got a pretty face, the more to lure you in to the shadows to see what she’s all twisted about. The MotionScan technology used in L.A. Noire is unprecedented in it’s fidelity and its really hard to go back to the games you’ve played before and not be a little crest fallen at the mannequin-esque quality of your typical videogame characters. But there’s little else to prop the game up. The street crimes are literal filler during cases, and break down to “chase down perp, shoot or tackle, cut scene, move on”. Which, when coupled with some the actions you do during the cases can lead to severe de ja vu.

The biggest knock against the game is it’s pacing. Which would’ve been better served with a shorter completion time. The game clocks in at about 20 hours, and in that time you’ve done and seen everything the game has to offer. More than once. If you attempt all the street crimes, you’ll do everything the game has to offer four or five times.

The big sale of L.A. Noire is the detective work and interrogations that make up the meat of the game. Like an old timey point-n-click adventure, you’ll wander around crime scenes and pick up odds and ends to gather clues that you’ll then use during the interrogation aspect of the various cases you take on. You’ll ask a victim or suspect a series of questions, they will answer and you’ll have to pick if they are telling the truth, doubt the information they say, or accuse them of lying where then you’ll have to produce the aforementioned evidence proving they’re lying. It takes a little time to discern the doubt/lie mechanic and sometimes you can miss key evidence that would lead you to accuse them of lying. The one downside of the interview mechanic is that most everyone can be doubted or accused of lying. It’s like telling the truth is a massive aversion. So much so that I was dumbfounded at finding a couple of characters were in fact telling me the truth, they were so few and far between.

The game is broken up by cases desks: Patrol, Traffic, Homicide and Arson. You’ll move through each desk in a linear fashion getting “promoted” to the next desk. Some of the desks have tiny story arcs in them that couple with the main arc of the story, if and when it decides to show up.

In between some cases and desks flashbacks of protagonist Cole Phelps’ time with the Marines in Okinawa. The flashbacks don’t really start making sense until around act three, but they do fill in gaps with some of the characters you run in during the game.

Cole Phelps, like many of his fellow Rockstar Games brethren, has a troubled past he’s trying to overcome, and you get to join in some of that during your time with him in L.A. Noire. Unlike his other brethren, the trouble in his past hardly ever interferes with the game, and since the game’s pacing takes so long to get to the payoff for all these flashbacks it doesn’t really help or hurt the game.

The game attempts to ape the “noir” film rules for most of narrative structure. Which is fine for first half of the game, but as the cases begin to leave the circle of lady killings and foul play it starts losing steam. There’s some loose connective tissue in the terms of throwaway cut scenes trying futility to tie the “noir” elements together for the “great fall” in the middle acts.

The game goes from episodic to full on narrative tilt pretty much halfway through the game. It goes from quaint to why even bother with the whole “noir” element. Then swoops in with the final “noir” flourish, delivering the emotion of futility in the narrative which is great for a movie but not so much for a game. Especially one that you’ve spent a couple of dozen hours with.

Now, Red Dead Redemption similarly pulled this kind of maneuver not so long ago, so it can be done properly and not cheat the player.

Reviewing this game is difficult, in terms of a tech demo, it’s terrific! Never before has facial fidelity been so great, and it taps in to that subconscious ability people have to recognize facial ticks and subtly of facial movement. However, as a game it falls so short of anything on the market. The proclamation that it’s a 90% accurate depiction of 1940’s Los Angeles is wasted on the linear styling’s of the game. It’s a great backdrop, but it’s lifeless and devoid of that spark that inhabits much of Rockstar’s open world games.

I never went in to L.A. Noire expecting a GTA type of open world with a myriad of things to do, but I did expect the world to pulse and move like a real city. The linearity of the story is one thing, but then to fill it with only street crime side quests and little else is truly a shame.


Final Verdict: A very good rental. Look forward to the use of the MotionScan technology in the future.