If Portal 2 hadn’t been released already, I’d be ready to call LA Noire the best game of the year so far. It’s a remarkable game that both the casual and the hardcore can enjoy, but it is important to note that this is different from what you might expect out of a Rockstar game. Not to sound too similiar to Brad’s review, but LA Noire really is an adventure game at its core. While you are free to roam the streets of a beautifully recreated 1947 Los Angeles, it’s not a sandbox game where you can do what you want, whenever you want. That means no random drive-bys, and no beating up hookers with baseball bats as you may be familiar with in the GTA series. While some may claim that this is a step back for Rockstar, I disagree. You’re on the other side of the law now; you play as a straight-laced cop out to clean up the streets, and the game does an excellent job of really immersing you in the experience of being a detective, so prohibiting you from going out and wreaking havoc on the people helps to keep you immersed in that world and focused on the task at hand.
You play as Cole Phelps, an idealistic and perhaps somewhat naïve war hero. He believes in doing things by the book and is out to rid the city of criminals. You start out as a beat cop in uniform and on patrol as you tackle your first few cases before you work your way through the ranks of traffic, homicide, vice, and arson divisions. Each division has a few cases within, totaling out to just over 20 cases in all and they each have their own unique twists to the investigations, so by the time you’re tired of solving one set of crimes, a whole new set emerges. As the game goes on, the cases become more complex and compelling, with some investigations tying into previous ones, which helps to give the game a story instead of sending you from one random assignment to the next. These cases can take anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour to complete, giving you about 15 to 20 hours of game time, depending on how fast you work through them.
As I mentioned earlier, LA Noire is an adventure game. While there are gunfights and car chases sprinkled throughout the street crime side quests and in between the investigations, the gameplay is fairly straightforward; you get your case, investigate the scene, look for clues, follow up on leads, and interview witnesses and suspects. While things won’t always play out in that order, those aspects make up the bulk of the detective work. When you first arrive on scene, your job is usually to search for clues and evidence. While it’s up to you to find everything, the game does a good job of letting you know what clues are important as well as when you’ve found all the necessary evidence in a particular area. Once all that is done, it’s usually time to interview witnesses or interrogate suspects. The game uses a new type of motion capture technology for rendering facial animations and the results are frighteningly realistic. As you conduct your interviews, you must take note of their body language and facial movements to determine if someone is telling the truth or not. It’s a really nice touch, as the technology manages to capture almost every little detail of the human face and it’s definitely the feature that makes LA Noire stand out as a unique experience, but it’s also where I have my one problem with the game.
See, when you ask someone a question, and listen to their response, you have the option of selecting “truth”, “doubt”, or “lie”. Predictably, you select “truth” if you think their statement is honest, but if you think their lying, you select “doubt” if it’s just your hunch or “lie” if you actually have evidence to prove their dishonesty. While this is a great system, there were times where I wanted to select “doubt” or “lie” if I thought their statement had a minor inconsistency, but when I selected one of those options, Cole came off as unnecessarily aggressive, outright accusing whoever it was of committing the crime. This can be pretty off-setting when I feel like a witness isn’t giving me the full story, and instead of trying to subtly get more information out of him or her, your character immediately jumps to conclusions by harassing them. It was the one part of the experience that reminded me “oh yeah, you’re playing a game”, since I felt like I wasn’t really in control of what was happening. Even still, I never felt like Cole’s responses took me in the wrong direction of the case, and I usually ended up getting helpful information from the interviewees.
Even though I already talked about the amazing facial features, it’s worth mentioning that the entire game is beautifully presented. Amazing performances by the actors give the game believability and an incredibly cinematic feel, all taking place in a city with real-world cars, guns, products, and landmarks. This attention to detail is what helped to keep me continuously immersed in the game. This ties into the sound design as well; memorable voice work, accurate 1940s music on the radio, and the typical film noir sound samples are heard throughout the game to serve as the icing on the cake.
While some may be put off from the restraints that the game places on you, it’s only there to help bring players further into this incredibly immersive world. If you’re a fan of any work from Rockstar, or even those Lucasarts point-and-click adventure games from the 1990s, you owe it to yourself to give LA Noire a try. Engaging detective work coupled with the appropriate amount of full-on action and realistic performances help to wrap LA Noire in a package that is Rockstar’s newest masterpiece.