Police Procedural at its Best
LA Noire is a game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar. Team Bondi had been working on LA Noire for awhile before Rockstar came around to publish it. It was originally slated to be a Playstation 3 exclusive, but was changed after Rockstar came in to the story. When I started hearing about LA Noire again after the long break of hearing nothing about it, I then saw the Rockstar name attached to it. Not really knowing what LA Noire was I was fully expecting, Grand Theft Auto:Los Angeles. This is where I was totally wrong. This has the quality of a Rockstar published game with out almost any of the Grand Theft Autoness of recent Rockstar games.
You play as, hot off World War II, Detective Cole Phelps. You are the new guy in the LAPD, and you must work your way up starting out as a beat cop and ending on Arson. Through out the game you are with a partner all different partners as you move up the LAPD ladder. As in any cop procedural you, as the new guy, are basically hated by all partners and as you work cases you gain their trust. As you get on to Vice, a late game desk, you sometimes encounter partners from older desks as the jurisdiction of different desks overlap. I thought that small touch was a great thing to add. As a fan of shows like Law and Order those type of things happen almost all the time, and it was something I was not really expecting from LA Noire. The story is the most important thing about this game. Playing this game is almost like watching an interactive Law and Order 1940. Through out the game there is a background story going on that you don’t really get to be a part of until Vice. Scattered through out the game are 13 newspapers. In these newspapers is the story from a main character in that story, not Cole Phelps.
Now that it has been established that Team Bondi can write a good story how do they handle gameplay that can work with the story? The answer is fantastically. You ,as I mentioned later, are Cole Phelps. He is a very observant, and persuasive person. When getting a case from a desk's captain you can elect to drive to the case start spot or just hold a button and make your partner drive. Through most of the game I chose to make me partner drive. This is because at the end of the case you get a rating based on how many clues you found, how many questions you got right, and damage to the city, citizens, and cars. I am a HORRIBLE driver in video games. This is fine in Grand Theft Auto as running into people is fine as long as they are not cops. In LA Noire this is the total opposite. While running in to a car will not get you any punishment right away at the end of the case you will be chewed out by a captain if your rating is too low. Now working the case is where the game shines. As I mentioned earlier there are clues to find and questions to ask. When you finally get to the case start spot you must start looking around for clues. The game helps you through out this process as sound cues and controller rumble,if on 360 or using a Dualshock, let you know how many clues you have left, and if you are close to a clue. The clues open up questions in interrogation sequences and help ensure that you chose the correct person. The key word is “help”, as they do not totally ensure you convict the right person. In the interrogation sequences when asking questions you can choose to believe, doubt, or call a person out on a lie. In the beginning the line between Lie and Doubt is kind of hazy. Lie is meant for when you have hard evidence against what a person is saying. I for one had a few times where I thought I had hard evidence against a person, but the evidence I thought I had did not prove what they wanted me to prove. In a situation like that it would have been best to choose doubt. Doubt is supposed to be used when you believe some one is holding something back or that you believe someone is lying but you do not have hard evidence. The problem with that is that there is only one answer to each question. If you miss a piece of evidence that would needed to be used to call someone out on their lie you automatically miss that question, there is no getting around that and getting them to tell you the truth there. Out side of the main story there are side cases to do. These can range from car chases to straight up shoot outs. All the side cases have way more set up then I thought they would. They seem integrated into the world well as some of them will even take you to real world landmarks.
The entire reason the Truth, Doubt, Lie gameplay feature works is because of the incredible technology Team Bondi created. The technology they created is a new way to capture the faces of the actors playing characters in the game. This feature has been the main talking point of LA Noire for as long as I can remember. As I was playing through the game there were many points were I recognized the face of people that I have seen from other shows and movies I have watched before. One example is while in Arson one of your suspects is a friend of Francis from Malcolm in the Middle. From what I have gathered they use up to thirty cameras to capture the performance of the actor or actress playing the part. The crazy part is every person in the game world has the facial technology of the main characters. In an open world game with many people in it, it is pretty crazy that all people have the same quality faces. It would have been easy for Team Bondi to skimp on the faces of non-important characters. The world in LA Noire is full fleshed out. Team Bondi worked with many different people to get 1947 Los Angles time era appropriate. There are many era accurate depiction of LA landmarks and over 90 different vehicles from the 1940's On the 360 version, the one I played, it ships on 3 discs while the Playstation 3 version ships on one Btu-Ray disc. On the 360 the disc swapping could have been handled better. They made the switched one case in to what ever desk they were going to have the switch during. I would have had them make me switch at the start of a desk not once case in to. The reason there are three discs on 360 is the facial technology. All three discs were filled to capacity and adding almost anything else would have to be pushed to a fourth disc. I believe disc swapping has been dealt with better than it was in Dead Space 2. In Dead Space 2 half the single player and all of the multiplayer was put on the first disc and the rest of the single player was put on the second disc. At least in LA Noire they did not try to shove in unneeded multiplayer. I am a person that thinks not all games need multiplayer and it is great to know some developers are on the same page as me.
Overall LA Noire was a surprise to me. Rockstar not forcing Team Bondi to Grand Theft Auto this up is respectable. Team Bondi was purchased by Rockstar, I believe that Team Bondi, along with Rockstar, will have a long and respectable life. What worries me is someone from Rockstar mentioning that LA Noire would make a good franchise. While I would love to see more LA Noire I do not want this to turn in to a yearly or even bi-yearly title. LA Noire clocks in at around 20 hours for the single player and there is enough incentive to go back and play cases to get the best rating. In my opinion this is a game all people must play, and must realize it is not just Grand Theft Auto: LA.
