L.A. Noire is ambitious and meticulous, but falls short in terms of enjoyment and engagement.
Before I go any further, though, let's back up a bit and go over the factual specifics about the game. In L.A. Noire, you play as Cole Phelps, a World War II veteran who made his mark in the Pacific campaign and earned the Silver Star there, and then joined the police force upon his return home. He begins the game as a patrolman, but after a series of successes (which also double as the game's tutorial missions), he is promoted to detective, at which point the real meat of the game begins.
Over the course of the game, which is fairly lengthy - it spans 3 discs on the Xbox 360 and took me a considerable amount of time to finish, well into the double-digits of hours - Phelps will go through four different desks on the force, those being traffic, homicide, vice, and arson. During his stay in each desk, he'll be tasked with solving crimes within that field. For example, while working traffic, he gets a case of two people found unconscious in a car that slammed into a sign, with ample evidence of foul play; on the other hand, while working homicide, he gets a case of a woman strangled to death and then left in the middle of a park. Many of these cases have a unifying theme between them that links some of them together, as Phelps comes to realize that the crimes are related.
There are four different modes of gameplay in the game, and any given case can easily transition between all four before it's solved. First, there's investigation - this involves combing through a scene of a crime or a scene of interest (such as a suspect's house), looking for any clues pertinent to the case. When Phelps comes across something of interest, the controller vibrates and a chime sounds, alerting you to the fact that you might have found something. Second, there's interrogation - this involves asking a person a series of questions. Each time the person responds, you have the option of either believing the person and asking for further detail, of casting doubt on what the person said, or of accusing the person of lying and presenting evidence indicating as much. Choosing correctly allows Phelps to gain additional clues and insight into the case. Third, there are chases - these typically involve chasing a fleeing suspect through the streets of L.A., either in a car on on foot, trying to make the suspect stop so he or she can be apprehended. Fourth, there are gunfights - these are basically what it says on the tin: you have a number of bad guys with guns trying to kill you and your job is to kill them all.
To be sure, L.A. Noire has a lot going for it, and I'm sure that someone who places more emphasis on that would give this game a very different score than I've given it. For starters, the game is a very good showcase for Rockstar's new facial capture technology, which combines the reading from several cameras around the person to get a 3D model of the person's face. Although the technology still has a ways to go - they really need to figure out how to better synchronize the face with the body - it goes a long way just as they claimed it would towards closing the so-called "uncanny valley", that being the situation where 3D models look very realistic, but don't "act human", making the viewer well aware that they're not looking at a real human being.
The attention to detail in the game, as well, is just jaw-dropping. The game has hundreds and hundreds of blocks of 1940s Los Angeles, all rendered in an extremely faithful form - the people, the cars, the buildings, the billboards, the prices, the phone numbers, the products: everything feels just like it's actually from the 1940s. The crimes, as well, are in fact also authentic, insofar as they're inspired by actual crimes that occurred in Los Angeles in the 1940s, although they have of course been sufficiently fictionalized in order to fit the video game. The extent to which Team Bondi went to create a real, 1940s Los Angeles experience, is truly commendable.
Unfortunately, however, the excellent parts of the game are largely aesthetic in nature, while the more negative parts of the game are more integral. For starters, I found the story in the game to be, unfortunately, just not that interesting when all was said and done. Despite threads tying them together and attempting to make them a unified whole, the cases in the game were largely overly segregated and felt too episodic in nature. There were repeat offenders between cases, for sure, but that was far in the background, and the immediate facts in each case presented basically a brand new selection of suspects, victims, witnesses, and so forth, never really giving the game a chance to go very deep into any train of thought. Furthermore, because every case saw brand new faces, there was actually very little bona fide character development or intra-character chemistry in the game at all. The few situations where there were recurring characters who did interact with each other multiple times, it never failed to feel superficial, either - by the end of the game, I really didn't feel as though I knew any of the characters much better than when they were first introduced. There were a few glimmerings of character development in the course of the game, but they were fleeting.
Two of the four game modes enumerated above also were, in my evaluation, not done very well at all. The investigation portions of the game was one of them. There's no real obvious indicator regarding what's a clue and what's just part of the background, so investigations often degrade into just wandering around aimlessly, hoping to feel your controller vibrate in response to something that you may not even be able to see, and then just repeating that until the location is crossed off in the pause screen, indicating that you've found everything. This can get very tedious and boring, and really does not advance anything in the game much. You can use "intuition points", which you pick up by doing well in the game, in order to reveal all of the clues hidden in an area - but then that's basically just cheating.
The other mode in the game that wasn't done very well was the interrogations. These were supposed to be the prime showcase of the game's facial capture technology, since you're supposed to need to watch the subject and try to tell whether or not they're being truthful, but the very simplistic and arbitrary nature of much of these portions of the game more or less kill any engagement that they might otherwise have contained. For starters, to determine whether the person is being truthful or not, there's basically just three signs to look for: does the person respond in a very abrupt manner, does the person's eyes dart around like they've got a contact lens caught in them, and does the person visibly swallow repeatedly? If any of those are true, the person's probably not being truthful.
Even if you know that this is the case, though, the difference between the three options is not very well-established, either. As it happens, "Truth" is basically only selected when the person is giving you the 100%, swear-to-God, whole, full truth; if the person is even just not mentioning something on the side, you may need to pick "Doubt" or "Lie" even if what they said was probably true. And even if you know it's "Doubt" or "Lie", it's often not at all obvious which is correct, since the meaning behind each clue is not always immediately apparent. As such, interrogations would often boil down to just a plain old coin flip for me, with no obvious indicators telling me one way or another. Needless to say, this does not make for very interesting gameplay.
I should give kudos where it's due, though: the chases and gunfights were significantly better and more exciting than these two modes.
The game also has very little replay value once it's done, as well. Unlike GTA, you play as a cop in this game, so there isn't much sandbox fun to be had at citizens' expense. There are "street crimes" that you can attend to if you so choose, which are basically side missions not related to the main case, but these tend to be short, and have nothing at all to do with the main story, as far as I could tell, so these don't make for very interesting adventures, and by the end of the game I was just completely ignoring requests the game prompted me with to deal with street crime.
The soundtrack in the game wasn't remarkable, but at the same time that's kind of to be expected - the soundtrack was definitely faithful both to the 1940s and to the film noir genre, so I can't fault them too much for that.
All in all, L.A. Noire is a very polarized game. What it does well, it does really, really well. What it doesn't do well, however, it does quite poorly indeed. Its aesthetics and attention to detail are absolutely top-notch, but its story, characters, and gameplay leave much to be desired. What one concludes about the worth of L.A. Noire will thus depend very heavily on what one values. As I value story and characters very highly, the game's lack of creativity and interest in those areas killed it for me. One who doesn't care so much about those aspects could quite easily like the game significantly more.
The bottom line I'd give is that if you want to check out Rockstar's new facial capture technology, or if you want to experience a game that very faithfully recreates Los Angeles as it was in the 1940s, then you should definitely check out L.A. Noire. If on the other hand you're looking for an engaging detective story with great characters and a gripping narrative, then you might want to look elsewhere.