L.A. Noire is both a highly immersive take of 1947 Los Angeles police work as well as leaving you wanting more.
Now before one thinks of this as a 1940s-style GTA, you are now a cop - not the outlaw of previous games a-la John Marston or Niko Bellic. Driving and shooting elements are present in the game, but are of much less significance this time, instead pitting you to the work of investigating crime scenes, interviewing relevant persons, and most of all, interrogating them to solve the case in the best way possible. Although you can fail by letting a suspect get away or being gunned down, checkpoints are abound everywhere and all cases will get solved regardless of how well or poorly you interview. However, by nailing some of those key interview questions, you can get those vital clues to help bypass going to unimportant locations, and most importantly of all, to finish the case with the best rating possible.
Where L.A. Noire hits its Zenith is its storyline. You play as Cole Phelps, a Marine fresh from the war, starting out as a beat cop, eventually making your way to Traffic, then to Homicide, and then to Vice. Along the way, many very interesting twists and turns in the story building up to an all-spectacular climax will emulate the true stories of 1947 Los Angeles with the use of state-of-the-art motion capturing technology, providing faces on the characters unlike any game to come before that. In addition, the visuals present themselves truly like you were there (except for maybe a zip code on a post office whereas ZIP was not implemented until the 1960s), with the kind of graphics you would come to expect in a Rockstar title as well as a game world modeled after the very same layout Los Angeles had in its pre-Freeway days.
Unfortunately, you will find that the game's 20-25 hour story line will be a little shorter than you will have hoped for. There is no multiplayer, not that that would have been possible anyway. Once you have completed the cases, you will probably want to replay them through the cases menu to correct what mistakes you may have made, find that clue that you may have missed, and maybe go for some of those big achievements such as the usual 100% completion as well as getting five stars on every case. However, this game truly is like a TV show, and the usual game mechanics you would expect to find are not particularly present here. Watching in-game footage of all the cases on YouTube will probably give you as close to actually playing it as you can get compared to doing the same with other games, but this game is a good buy for those interested in the subject matter, or at least a rental.