LA Noire is a new kind of game that attempts to bring investigation, interrogation, and good old fashioned police action together to form a realistic experience. The year is 1947, you jump into the shoes of Cole Phelps, a WWII veteran who wants to put the war behind him and start a new life. Phelps joins the LAPD and begins as a patrolman; it is your job to help him move up the ranks and uncover the seedy underground of 1940’s Los Angeles.
The game relies heavily on investigation and interrogation and the mechanic for that is pretty well done. Team Bondi, the developers, used a new motion capture system to depict every minute facial expression from an actor. This allows you to see if a person is lying or telling the truth based on the in-game avatar. The facial expressions are impressive; however it is sometimes difficult to read genuine fear about being questioned or someone who is hiding something. Eyes tend to shift and look away while talking, which is an indicator of someone lying, even if the person is telling the truth.
The interrogation scenes are pretty well done but you will actually spend more time investigating crime scenes for clues. When you walk past a clue your controller will shake and you can press the “X” button to investigate the clue. Sometimes you will need to investigate an object further by turning it or opening it up but the mechanics for doing that are always laid out on the screen so it isn’t difficult. There is “investigation music” that plays while you search an area and it stops when you have found all of the clu
es.
The investigation is usually pretty straightforward but sometimes it can be difficult to find that last clue that you are looking for. This can lead to annoying canvasses of the area for a while why you feel you have exhausted every option. Also, not every object is relevant to your case; in fact many aren’t, so you may end up trying to find the last non-relevant piece of junk in the crime scene. This is one of my minor complaints about the game; too many of the objects are useless to your investigation. I understand that having irrelevant objects makes the investigation more realistic but too many objects are irrelevant.
The graphics for the investigation are impressive when you approach and investigate a dead body. Especially for the homicide cases, there are a string of brutally beaten naked girls that show up and the game handles it well. Instead of being immature about it the game takes the naked bodies as if it were really a murder investigation, this shows that the medium of video games has matured quite a bit.
For the investigation and the interrogation there is an intuition system that helps you along the way. As you rank up you will receive an “intuition point” that you can use to help find clues or figure out what to do in an interrogation. The fastest way to rank up is to get experience from answering dispatch and attending to street crime. The street crimes are usually cookie-cutter assignments that end with you killing all of the perps or chasing down and tackling one guy.
Interspersed with the investigation and interrogation is a plethora of action sequences. You will chase suspects on foot, in cars, fight in brawls, and go through shootouts on the streets and in buildings. These action scenes are well paced and exciting and add a great variety to the gameplay. The shooting mechanic is a little tough to control, there is an auto-aim function when you peek out of cover but if you try to manually aim the small dot is hard to control. It doesn’t hurt the game too much but the game clearly wasn’t designed to be a shooter.
The story of the game is engaging to make an understatement. It draws you in and makes you want to keep playing until the completion. There are dynamic consequences for your actions; if you don’t find all the evidence at a crime scene you won’t have enough to convince a suspect to come clean. There are betrayals, plot twists, and all the good stuff you would expect from a game based on the film noir genre. I won’t spoil the end but I will say that it is my biggest issue with the game, I felt unfulfilled by the end of the game and wish the story had played out
differently. It was definitely going for the dark, moral ambiguity of film noir.
Besides some problems with the story there were some technical elements of the game that were frustrating. There were several instances of clipping, close ups of things like grass or plants were one dimensional and sloppy, and sometimes the characters’ faces were not rendered as well as other times. These technical problems didn’t take away from the gameplay but for a game that had examples of great facial rendering, it was a little disappointing to see the main character have a bad render during some cut scenes.
Overall the game hit the mark on many of its goals, it provides a dynamic and engaging storyline, well-developed characters, and fun action to keep you engaged. The minor cosmetic issues and my general distaste for the ending of the game hold it back from being great but it still is the kind of game that I like to see on the market. I hope to see more games like this in the future and I can’t wait to play some new cases for this game.
Pros
-Fantastic storyline
-Impressive facial models
-Good action
Cons
-Some bad renders
-Clipping and other technical bugs
-Unfulfilling ending
8/10
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