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The marketing campaign that preempted L.A Noire’s release didn’t do a great job at explaining what kind of game it is, so let’s be clear- L.A. Noire is an adventure game. That means it’s a methodically paced, story driven affair that boasts some interesting ideas, while simultaneously feeling like a chore to play. Fans of noir in general should find it satisfying on the whole, but anyone else might want to tread carefully when considering L.A. Noire.
Being an adventure game, you’ll spend the majority of your time in L.A. Noire doing things like canvasing crime scenes for evidence, interrogating suspects and witnesses, and listening to lots and lots of dialogue. Fortunately, these are the things the game does best. There are many clever touches that help streamline both investigations and interrogations. Musical chimes and timely vibrations do a great job at giving you plenty of useful feedback in everything you do, and an interesting selection of game show style helpers make interrogations feel a little more involved than they might have been otherwise. Playing detective and trying to piece together cases was easily my favorite part of the game, and it’s all made better by its excellent dialogue sequences. Quality actors and actresses lend both their voices and their likenesses to create perhaps the most realistic performances a game’s ever had. You have to see it to believe it, and stuff like this makes me think that the potential for movie quality acting is a possibility for games heading into the future.
For all the good things that L.A. Noire has going for it, each one is countered by something equally lackluster and/or frustrating. The great acting is undermined by a poorly woven and disjointed story, one that doesn’t handle its big moments (or plot holes) with nearly enough care. The joy of investigating crime scenes is frequently interrupted by boring shootouts, maddening stealth sequences, and clunky driving in a pointless open world. Worst of all, however, is the way the game’s bizarre logic brings down the otherwise interesting interrogations. Evidence rarely works as advertised, if it works at all, and the way the focus of the dialogue frequently takes hard swings destroys any logical patterns it tries to create- everything just feels arbitrary and inconsistent. The game also does a poor job at defining what your options of "Truth", "Doubt", and "Lie" really mean, and I felt like I spent most of the game trying to parse such semantics. The result was that I ended up gaming the system rather than treating it like an actual interrogation, and the fact that you get the most mileage out of doing so only serves to underscore how backwards they really are. The interrogations could have easily been the highlight of the game, but ended up being pretty disappointing and frustrating instead.
L.A. Noire scores big for trying a lot of interesting things in an underrepresented genre, but the act of playing the game is ultimately more trying than I would like. A more focused design, both in terms of story and gameplay, along with a more logical interrogation system would have done the game wonders. As it stands, L.A. Noire should be enjoyable enough for anyone interested in the idea of playing detective in a noir setting, but I don’t know that I would recommend it any more than that.
For additional information on my review style and scoring system, click here.
