Enjoyable brain-storming highs interspersed with frustrating issue-plagued lows make up this stylish film noir game
LA Noire puts you in the shoes of Cole Phelps, a war veteran in post-WWII Los Angeles. Atmosphere and setting-wise, LA Noire nails the film noir feel fantastically throughout the game. Smoke-billowing out of alleyways with dimly lit street-lights contrasting with the blinding lights of the Sunset Boulevard. It makes good use of its period setting in bringing out relevant issues present in the America that had just come out of the World War II. There's crime and politics and like in all film noir it's covered neck deep in filth and corruption. LA Noire does a bold take on a couple of disturbing themes and does it fairly well. The theme of young war heroes back from the traumatizing war and trying to fit back into the world runs throughout the game's story and Team Bondi pulls it off well.
LA Noire's gameplay can be divided into three sections – action, investigation and interrogation. For action, it largely follows the same rules as Rockstar's open-world games have done. For investigation, it gives you the freedom to roam around the crime scene and scour for clues. When you notice something of interest, you can pick it up to further examine it for further clues behind the crime. It often involves manipulating objects, or doing clever meta-puzzles like joining a pipeline in the heater to find out which part is exactly missing. All the clues you discover are noted in Cole's "notebook" which is the chief intersecting element between the investigation and interrogation aspects of the game. Once you gather clues, you can interview any eye-witnesses or potential suspects with questions. The questions vary depending on how thorough you have been with the scouring of the crime scene for clues. If you've missed out on a clue, you'll obviously not be able to ask the question. This part of the game is where the MotionScan comes into play. Upon asking the question, the person being interviewed will give you an answer, you will have to judge each time someone answers your question on whether they are being truthful, flat-out lying or not revealing anything. This is LA Noire in concept.
However in execution it is rife with issues – some minor and ignorable, others major and pretty frustrating. Chief amongst them are the action sequences. LA Noire is as uncomfortable as a kitty caught in the middle of a hail-storm when it comes to action sequences. You can see they were an aspect that were either forced or weren't thought out as well as the other aspects of the game. Aiming is poor. I came across situations where if I shot someone in the leg to slow him down, the person would get killed. On the contrary, if I shot someone on the chest the bullets would somehow "magically" not hit the victim. Shooting is poor and despite imitating GTA IV's model isn't even half as good as it. It's the same story for driving. Developers were caught in the midst of a dilemma on whether they should make driving into a more realistic or arcade-like model. The result is driving that seems like the unholy child of that is intent on annoying you. Instead of fixing the camera behind the car, it gives you freedom to rotate the camera while driving while making the car's trajectory relative to the camera's position. Result is a driving experience that isn't fun at all. It isn't annoying but it is never satisfying either. Luckily the game does allow you to skip the non-compulsory driving sequences so that's a good thing. There are also chasing sequences on foot. LA Noire loves using these every so often and while they aren't as problematic as shooting or driving to a lesser extent they aren't anything special either. These on-foot chase sequences seem a tad bit overused in the game perhaps indicating the developer had rather run out of ideas when it came to this side of the game.
Things seem a little brighter on the other side of the game. LA Noire is more comfortable playing as a detective than as a cop participating in shootouts and on-foot chase sequences. While investigation elements does exercise the key old-school rule of "observation and interactivity" – the illusion wears a bit thin at times. After the first few cases, LA Noire falls into a sort of a repetitive limbo where crime scenes appear increasingly more "set-up" than original. While it is understandable that crime scene evidence will be marked since the detective isn't the first person on the site, more variety in crime scenes would be a good thing. Third-person camera isn't best-suited for close-range observation during crime-scene investigation. While the game does zoom into clues once you discover them, discovering them from a rather far off behind the character you're controlling isn't always an easy task. Observation however isn't entirely necessary. One can go on a blind-A-pressing spree and chances are they'll end up discovering most of the clues. So as LA Noire's crime-scene variety keeps running thin, the charm and fun from the first few hours starts wearing thin. However the game surprisingly recovers from the mid-section dip in quality and enters into one of its best phases late into the game.
Interrogation is undoubtedly the most original and the best aspect of LA Noire. It runs hand-in-hand with MotionScan and the technology complements these sections. People being interviewed offer a wide palate of facial expressions and emotions and the key is reading them to decide whether they're telling you the truth, hiding the facts, or flat-out lying using the Truth,Doubt and Lie options. Not all people behave in the same way under nervousness of course which is why its great to see different people exhibit a varying degree of facade before breaking down. A Hollywood star can be very good at faking emotions and expressions while a 15-year old victim may not. A criminal may be smug at the start of the interrogation but as you uncover and prove more evidence linking him to the crime, you can slowly see his facial façade wearing thin. On the other hand, wrongly accusing someone can make them further retreat behind their mental wall making it difficult to squirm out the truth from them. LA Noire walks along the believable side of the spectrum and never goes for too much over-the-top. One can be picky and perhaps complain that the highly realistic facial animation with the sub-par body animation can break the illusion sometimes but that's just being a bit too criticizing about the game's issues. That said however even the best part of LA Noire isn't without its problems. Most of these problems associated with the interrogation side of the game come from the fact that you can never quite predict what Cole is going to say and more importantly in what tone. Chief responsible for this problem is the "Doubt" option. Often doubting a suspect can lead to screw-ups of epic proportions. Cole decides at random to speak in either comforting or accusatory tone when you choose to "Doubt" someone. This makes it very hard for the player to judge exactly how Cole rather than the interviewee will respond.
That was the highs and lows of the three main aspects of the game. However the general design of LA Noire has its own shares of strengths and flaws as well. It can be a VERY inconsistent game. It may put you one moment in a typical recreation of an old-school adventure gaming puzzle and the next moment it may put you in an annoying platforming sequence that involves you rope-walking to reach a chandelier. LA Noire loves watching the gamer's mental graph jump from enjoyment to annoyance within matter of a few minutes and it behaves this way quite often.
Another underlying problem throughout LA Noire is that it is afraid of facing its players with failure. In crime-scene investigation, when Cole picks up something that isn't of any importance to the case, he says so aloud. This only further destroys the illusion and makes it seem more and more that the crime-scenes are nothing more than a "set-up" location of fixed points of interaction. LA Noire also is very linear and can be sometimes annoyingly hand-holding in its design. While it does give you an occasional amount of freedom to choose the order in which you'd like your investigation to proceed, it largely makes sure you follow the path for investigation it wants you to follow. It will also not allow you to revisit places you've already visited at times so this means that if you get the order of investigation wrong you might end up performing a lot poorly in your case report than you should have. This only enhances the feeling that LA Noire is a highly linear experience that tries to provide illusion of freedom but to little success. That said there are cases where you may end up putting the wrong person in the jail due to lack of proper implicating evidence or wrong deductions. It is smart in that aspect yet severely restricting in player's choice and freedom otherwise.
LA Noire's story follows Cole's journey from an ordinary patrolman on the streets to one of the celebrated detectives of the LAPD. The game's story are divided into five desks of the LAPD – Patrol, Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson. Naturally each of the desk focuses on a particular crime but the common story keeps building throughout the run of the 20-odd hours of the game. Much of this story proceeds through flashback cutscenes narrating the traumatic experiences of Cole as a WWII-soldier in Japan. There are also newspapers scattered which give you further insight into some of the plot elements. The case desks are naturally where the inconsistency in quality of LA Noire comes into the picture – not all desks are as good as some of the others. Patrol is like an extended tutorial to the game, Traffic more of an appetizer of sorts. Homicide is where things go really wrong. It should have been a strong and interesting section of the game – however Homicide is where LA Noire's glaring lack of variety in gameplay comes to haunt the game and overshadow some of its finer elements. It is without question one of the low-points of the game and it contributes to an extended dip in quality during the game's mid-sections. However when almost all hope is lost and LA Noire seems to have run out of gas, it makes a surprisingly strong and rather stylish comeback in the Vice desk and by the time it enters into the final few hours the game has become a full-blown film noir incorporating a lot of familiar elements that aficionados of the genre will certainly appreciate.
Ultimately LA Noire ends up giving the feeling that it could have been a lot more. It is unquestionably a very frustrating and oft-annoying experience but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun playing it. Part of the fun comes from the uniqueness and well it implements the new technology and plays to its strengths. It is a game of sharp highs and lows. Inconsistent in quality and plagued with issues –some which can be ignored others not so much. These flaws are compounded by its design which can be severely restricting if it wants to and which derives some sort of pleasure in exciting and annoying gamers within the space of few minutes. LA Noire is built upon unique and innovative ideas but not all of those ideas evolve into enjoyable and fully-digestible gameplay mechanics. LA Noire shifts between stylish, ingenious moments to ones plagued with issues pretty quickly. In that sense, it is an unquestionably enjoyable experience but also without a doubt a very frustrating one too.