Game Review: L.A. Noire

Copied from my Amazon.com review.

There are some things that you should know before you go into this game. Even though Team Bondi's L.A. NOIRE has the Rockstar brand on the cover, even though there is some revolutionary technology driving the narrative, and even though 1940s downtown L.A. has been recreated historically to 90% accuracy, this might not be the video game you thought you were buying. I know that it certainly took me by surprise. It's a game that's nothing like Rockstar's previous titles, such as the magnificent Red Dead Redemption or the GTA series. Where as those games placed you firmly on one side of the law and attempted to blur the lines, L.A. NOIRE tries the same take from an officer's perspective, albeit with a completely different approach.

Though the main storyline takes a backseat for most of the game, you'll follow Detective Cole Phelps as he makes his way up through the hierarchy of the Los Angeles Police Department. Starting as patrolman, you'll eventually find yourself working cases for the traffic, arson, homicide, and vice divisions, with each having its own subplot and cast of characters. Each of these subplots are then broken up further into "episodes," with their own isolated set of investigations, clues, victims, and suspects. When all is said and done, it feels like playing through a full season of LAW AND ORDER.

The approach to each of these episodes doesn't vary much. The beginning will introduce you to the crime, after which you follow the clues around 1940s L.A. until you have a decent pool of evidence going. To gather this evidence, you'll be asked to walk the crime scene and other places of relevance until your character notices something, at which point you'll enter an examination mode of sorts and take a closer look at whatever it was you've picked up. Sometimes the things you can examine will be junk, but anything that adds to your case will be logged away for further use.

In the natural course of compiling evidence, a list of suspects and witnesses will start to present itself. This is where interrogations come in, what you'll very likely end up spending 85% of the game doing. And it's also where the game's technology comes into play.

Thanks to real-time facial motion capture, the characters you come into contact with in L.A. NOIRE aren't like anything you've seen in any other video game. L.A. NOIRE relies on real, acted performances instead of just voice acting, providing a sense of realism and immersion that few games have managed to attain. When interviewing a suspicious witness, a flick of the eyes and a nervous gulp might give him away, while a firm, eye-to-eye stare might convince you the suspect is telling the truth. This also makes the drama and the character interactions just seem so much more real, like you were watching a very, very good crime series instead of just playing a video game.

But that is where my gripes with the game come into play. For the most part, L.A. NOIRE doesn't really play like your average video game and is more like a TV series with interactive moments. 1940s L.A. has been recreated with astounding attention to detail, but the game doesn't encourage exploration at all. The story is constantly in play, and while diverging away from your next waypoint is definitely allowed, it just feels... wrong. It doesn't feel like you should be driving around at random, exploring things, seeing the sights. That certainly might not be the case for some players, but I tried free roaming a grand total of one time and felt uncomfortable doing so. Like, as an adult, I should know better.

And those playable parts of the game are gradually, over the course of this 20 to 25 hour game, worn down by repetition. Confronting a suspect will usually always end in some kind of dramatic and destructive chase, either on foot or by car, regardless of the suspect's guilt. Interrogations lose some of their shine once you realize that even most of the innocent people will find any reason to lie to you. And since the game doesn't allow you to undo your choices or missteps during interrogations without reloading the game to an earlier autosave, some of the confrontations can get old really fast.

With that, the gameplay stops feeling like the focus of the game and more like a means to an end, because outside all of the driving, the car/foot chases, and interrogations, there is a stellar story going on in the foreground against a realistic setting. The writing is pitch perfect to the point where you'd almost expect the developers had lived through the time period. Events and rhetoric from the time are constantly making their way into the script. Hollywood is beginning is rise as the entertainment capital of the world, the stars on film are brighter than the ones in the sky, and capitalism is in full swing in post-war L.A. Advertisements are everywhere, there's a cigarette in everyone's hand, the beginnings of the Second Red Scare are making its way onto the radio.

Playing the game really did feel like stepping back in time, and that's why it gets four stars from me. It felt like an experience more than a game. In fact, sometimes I was so absorbed by the plot twist and the minute details of the setting and of the script, that when everything eventually stopped and I was back in control of Detective Phelps again, I had to wake up and remind myself, "Oh, yeah... I have to play this thing."