There's more religion in a nightstick than a hundred cathedrals
L.A. Noire is Team Bondi and Rockstar Games’ love letter to the film noir genre, complete with a a lovingly recreated post-WWII Los Angeles. In contrast to the general open-world games created by Rockstar, this time you aren’t able to create wholesale mayhem on a grand scale, which makes sense since you are playing as an officer of the law. Nay, sirs and ma’ams, this time investigation and interrogation are the name of the game. At its core, L.A. Noire is an adventure game, where time is spent searching crime scenes for clues and pumping persons of interest for information. There are segments of third person shooting, but they take a back seat to the aforementioned aspects.
You play the role of Cole Phelps, a decorated World War 2 veteran turned beat cop. He’s a very by the book sort; practically a boy scout when compared to a Niko Bellic or John Marston. The story is told through Cole’s rise through the LAPD ranks via cases at different desks, including traffic, homicide, vice and arson with his time as a beat cop acting largely as a tutorial for the game to come. Interspersed between the cases are some interesting vignettes showing Cole’s time in the war and how it ties in to the story of what’s currently going down in the city of angels. Believe me, by the time you get to the climax, every damn thing ties together. It would also behoove you to collect all the newspaper collectibles, since they are the games way of expounding behind the scenes things happening in the story that Cole wouldn’t directly know about.
From a technological standpoint, the facial animations in this game are completely out of this world, though they tend to make the bodily animations look poor in comparison. The game world is pretty impressively modeled on Los Angeles, boasting 90% replication on the Social Club ticker. The driving seems like it handles much like GTA IV, though without the aid of a full scale gps. I can understand why it isn’t there thematically, but the minimap is there already, might as well go the whole 9. Honestly, my favorite part of the driving is setting a waypoint and telling your partner to drive to the destination, since much like the goggles, the siren does nothing. I can’t deny my love for the aesthetics of the cars during that period though; they even had a Hudson that looked like the pictures of what my grandfather used to race. The shooting feels serviceable, but again, that isn’t the main aim. There’s also the general open world fare of collectibles, landmarks and film reels, which don’t really add anything mechanically, though the former does make wrapping up the homicide case line easier. There are also street crimes to bust, basically the side quests of the world. They do occasionally involve characters involved in previous cases, most notably a hit and run driver that gave me a certain satisfaction to finally put away.
Investigating crime scenes involve walking around the scene looking for clues, when you find something that may be relevant a musical chime will play as well as some controller feedback, but these aids can be turned off if you so desire. Another musical cue plays when all the clues at a particular location is found so you don’t spend all your time looking at the always sadly useless empty bottle. Interrogation is largely a game of being able to read someone’s expression, another great use of the tech, and knowing when to doubt and press them for more information, or to flat-out call them a liar and use a piece of evidence to prove it. If you’re stumped, you can also use your intuition, which you can store up to 5 points per case, allowing you to put all the clues on the minimap, remove an incorrect answer from a line of questioning, or to ask the community, which will show percentage breakdowns of what everyone else playing the game picked. The intuition points are earned via an experience system, which funnels in from different sources such as how well an interrogation is preformed or finding collectibles. It also seemed like I had a full stock of intuition for each case once I hit 20, but I wasn’t using a lot of points by that point of the game either.
I’ve heard about this game causing some ps3 overheating problems, while mine never overheated per se, the fans were always in high gear and blowing hot. I experienced two lockups and the frame rate only stuttered on me once the entire game; not enough to cause me any strife in the 28 hours I put into it.
All in all, L.A. Noire is something you play to experience the story, because it really is like watching a film noir story unfold. The character performances are impressive, to the point of being eerie and almost believably human. The style of gameplay might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I had a hell of a time putting it down until I finished it.
