What L.A Noire is built to do it does well. Unfortunately, it does other things, too.
L.A Noire does three things very well. It builds a fantastic and vibrant city that is filled with life and is fun to cruise through, just taking in the scenery.
Picking up clues, analyzing them and using them in interrogations can be hugely satisfying and intuition helps to pick up the slack where clues may be hidden or questions may be obscure.
And the lie detection system works perfectly. Every character's face is expressive and real and always great to watch. Although, it is very easy to tell when someone isn't being truthful.
The rest of the game, however, doesn't pan out as well: Chasing people is fine, but chase a person far enough, whether in a car or on foot, and eventually the chase will end on its own, though in a cinematic fashion. The sequences just feel much too scripted.
Shoot and fist fights are fine, but they don't pack much punch, just a way to break the monotony.
Monotony is the biggest problem with this title, though, especially with painful crawl that the plot moves at. Almost the entire second disk of the game is a copy and paste of the same mission structure five times that ends with a scavenger hunt to landmarks you may not even have on your map. This happens again, but to a shorter extent, when you make arson squad and you're literally re-using clues from past cases.
For a story-driven game to lack much of a story isn't great, but, ultimately every point that L.A Noire sells itself on is done perfectly and can make for an enjoyable experience. Just don't expect much more than that.