Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Ambitious"

LA Noire is an Australian made game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games, who created the Grand Theft Auto series. The game takes place in 1947 Los Angeles, where you play as former war hero gone detective Cole Phelps. It's a story driven third person adventure game featuring a large open world environment.

The game takes a radically different approach to the genre, as whilst the game does involve some shootouts, that's not the games main focus. Sinse you play as a detective, you spend most of your time in LA Noire finding clues, interviewing people, driving around and chasing suspects. It's a much slower paced game compared to most, so it's definately not going to appeal to everyone.

It's nice to see that real music and cars were put into the game, true to the late 1940's style. The city feels authentic and the characters seem believable.

The main story missions are cut up into different cases, as each case has its own substory to it. Most of these cases are murders, where you, as Detective Cole Phelps, have to find out the suspect. Interestingly, if you fail to find out who the suspect is, the game continues on after that point.
The game has a great storyline, though the developers, Team Bondi, seemed to get the pacing of the story pretty wrong. The main storyline only really kicks in during the last quarter of the game, and it's cut off too short. Not to say the game is short, it would take over 10 hours to complete, it's just the storylines pacing feels wrong.

Overall LA Noire is a nice change in pace for a video game, and it's definately a step forward in the industry. I would like to see more games like this in the future. LA Noire was released by Rockstar on the PS3 and xBox360 in May 2011, and was released on the PC November 2011.