Review: L.A. Noire

Rockstar Games brings the classic detective thriller to consoles. 

Developer: Team Bondi/Rockstar Games 
Publisher: Take 2 
Platforms:  PS3/ Xbox 360 [PS3 reviewed]

From the streets of Vice City to the sprawling deserts of South Texas, Rockstar Games has had years of experience in perfecting their sandbox style gameplay, and it’s translated exceptionally well across both locations and time periods. Post World War II Los Angeles proves to be the perfect roaming ground for this hard boiled detective thriller, and the trademark Rockstar gameplay doesn’t lose any of its style or substance in the shuffle. L.A. Noire is an intelligent thinking man’s game, with enough fast paced car chases and gunfights layered on top to satisfy all kinds of gamers through and through. While the surprising lack of background content is a little disappointing, L.A. Noire delivers on every promise it makes, and it does so with style.

L.A. Noire’s visual style is one of the things that immediately captures your attention. Fading into each case from a black and white title screen with cryptic headings, underlined with it’s dark and eerie musical score, the game quickly develops its own unique sense of classic film style something akin to an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and the option to play in full black and white gives it an even greater vintage noire element. The game really feels and looks like playing through a 40’s era crime show, and it’s a method of presentation that truly works. Where the real magic in L.A. Noire’s visuals lies is the facial mapping of the character models. One of the highlights from the early trailers on, the facial expressions were promised to be lifelike in movement and context, betraying lies and anxiety during interrogations, and otherwise just showing great emotion during story cutscenes. Everything they told us was entirely true. From the subtle mannerisms to the tell tale signs of deceit, each character has a detailed facial musculature that gives them an impressively lifelike appearance in movement. Actors such as John Noble, Greg Grunberg, and Patrick Fischler, are instantly recognizable by not only voice but appearance and mannerisms, greatly reinforcing that unique film-like quality and giving a lot of subtly and depth to it’s characters.

L.A. Noire’s narrative spans a complete set of cases over five different desks in the L.A.P.D. Beginning as a beat cop bagging evidence for lazy homicide detectives, and working your way all the up to Administrative Vice. The story is told in a similar fashion to Call of Duty: Black Ops. (you know, only good) in that breaks in between cases present flashbacks to detective Cole Phelps’s time in the marines during the American invasion of Japan, along with introducing other notable characters in the process. What first looks like a simple characterization device quickly reveals itself to be something bigger that is relevant to every step of Phelps’s story. Everything fits together by the end in an extremely well considered and engaging story. While the somewhat lacklustre final act can feel rushed and inconsistent at times, the plot as a whole holds up remarkably well under close scrutiny. Boasting an impressive (for most new games) twenty hour story, L.A. Noire is one of few recent games that’s captured my attention beginning to end without letting me grow overly bored at some point or another. From investigating cases as historically high profile as the unsolved Black Dhalia murders, to tracking down the mysterious appearance of hundreds of pounds army morphine on the street market, there is no shortage of interesting subplots and shocking conspiracies to be had on the gritty streets of L.A.

The gameplay style in L.A. Noire is very much a stripped down, less flashy version of GTA. The map is huge, but aside from unlocking new car models, searching for film reels, and responding to street crimes, there isn’t a whole lot to do outside of the cases. Driving from one end of the city to the other as often as you need to can get incredibly tedious, but the fast travel option can take care of that at the cost of responding to street crimes and increasing your rank.

It’s clear that Rockstar focused heavily on the detective side of gameplay. Interactive crime scenes use audio cues to help you locate various objects which can be inspected, relevant items are logged in your notebook and can open up new locations and avenues of investigation, or be used in interrogations to disprove lies. It’s a smoothly flowing system that is both functional and stylish, and solves a lot of the problems present in Quantic Dream’s mystery thriller Heavy Rain. And then there are the interrogations.An innovative system of interactive dialogue where the player asks a question of a witness or suspect and is given three options to respond: accept their answer as truth, cast doubts on the accuracy of the statement and push for more, or accuse them of outright lying and present evidence to back it up. It sounds a lot easier than it is. The interrogation sections are some of the most challenging parts of the game, and they can make or break a case in a matter of seconds. While I would have enjoyed having control over the morality of the character, having choices whether to fight to expose corruption or go along with it and try to cover things up, I don’t hold it against L.A. Noire to leave it out, and the game doesn’t suffer without a morality system.

L.A. Noire feels a little bit barebones for a sandbox style title, but there is more than enough content over the story itself, and room for plenty of DLC, to make it a worthwhile title. The game’s format lends itself well to DLC expansion, and perhaps we’ll see Noire titles for other cities and time periods, it’s hard to say, but its potential for franchising is easy to see and L.A. Noire scratched an itch that hadn’t properly been satisfied since I played Déja Vu on the NES. All things considered, Rockstar and Team Bondi have created an amazing platform for film noire mysteries for the next gen. Its a genre that hasn’t seen much spotlight, and it should. L.A. Noire isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.

Galaxy Minute

-The well crafted narrative is full of interesting and lifelike characters

-The newly pioneered facial mapping makes for fun and challenging interrogations along with great cutscenes

-The lack of background content leaves the game feeling pretty bare

-The final act of the story feels a little tacked on, but overall it suffers little

By: Nathan Bertram

Purchase L.A. Noire from Amazon