Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

The tag lines on all the promotional stuff tell you all you need to know:

'Superb Graphics'
'Looks Phenomenal'
'Most authentic, realistic looking game EVER'

And who can disagree with any of the above? But the sad fact is that this game just didn't have enough to keep me hooked, or to care enough about even completing the game!!!

It's fun to begin with but I soon got tired when:

1 - At crime scene's, music plays until you find all the clues and then are prompted as to where the clues are, so you don't need to actually think the crime scene through at all and try and work things out for yourself. They tell you what clues to look at and tell you when you've looked at them all.

2 - To get good ratings from your captain, which leads to more points & promotions, you have to do everything by the book. This even means not hitting ANY cars, road signs or causing any public damage to ANYTHING while driving or speeding after crooks. So forget hand-braking it round corners - it's Driving Miss Daisy to get ahead in this world

3 - It's really liner and although you can drive round the massive, ever impressive realistic 1940's world - there's actually nothing else you can do. Apart from calls to attend minor incident's which make you drive MILES away from where you need to be next, AND BACK AGAIN (also review point 2 at this point), all you can do is drive to the next LINER crime scene or interrogation.

4 - It actually gets rock hard trying to figure out if someone is telling the truth or not. This leads to massive frustrations of getting it wrong over and over again.....but........

.....After you spend about 30-45mins per case dealing with all the above frustrations it all just leads down to one thing.........


.......a 50/50 decision......will you send down the suspect in interview room A or B? And if you get it wrong, start over, do it ALL again and choose the other guy.

So in short, everything you do is pointless anyway, as all decision lead to the same choice/conclusion. But that said, the game does look fantastic and you really get sucked into 1940's L.A and even the tunes on the radio are 1940's classics and make it feel really authentic. It is a new, exciting style of game play which is a real love/hate divider but I believe will lead the way in how games of the future will be developed and presented. My partner, for the first time, didn't mind watching me play this on the living room TV as she felt it was almost like watching an old detective movie, and quite enjoyed watching the case evolve. But this is ok for a 2/3hr film - but 10-20hrs? But with L.A Noire being shot from the same gun as both GTA & Red Dead Redemption it's hard to see where, or how, the gameplay got lost!!

So the burning question is - are consoles powerful enough yet to have all the looks and feel of L.A Noire but have the same freedom and gameplay as GTA or Red Dead? I understand why Rockstar wanted to make something that wasn't just GTA in the 40's as Red Dead was very similar to GTA but in the Wild West. Yet Red Dead had it's own feel, own emotion and really kept you (me anyway) wanting to see what actually happened next in the story as well as allowing you to go off in loads of other directions. I feel I got enough out the GTA franchise after Vice City & San Andreas so am now waiting on tender hooks for ANY news on Red Dead 2. I just don't think L.A Noire has enough in it to make this a Rockstar Bullseye sure hit you'll want to play over again once you've finished it. And this talk of Red Dead just makes me wanna trade in L.A and get Red Dead back.