Review: L.A. Noire

Rockstar is widely known for their prowess at creating deep, immerse open-world games - Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are two shining examples. In their latest, L.A. Noire, they drop the gangster/vigilante personas and put you on the other side of the law. As Cole Phelps, you’re tasked with bringing down the criminals of 1940′s Los Angeles as you work your way through the ranks of the LAPD. An ambitious title in the making for nearly a decade at Team Bondi, the technology introduced here is jaw-dropping, but does the whole experience add up?

Let’s get right to it: Team Bondi put together such a terrific facial animation system in L.A. Noire that we have a hard time going back and looking at other recent games. This puts them all to shame. Seeing brows wrinkle, cheeks move slightly when swallowing, and eyes darting about are crucial to how L.A. Noire works: reading people’s faces. In each of the game’s cases (which are broken up perfectly into sections that can be completed in one sitting), you’re tasked with solving a particular crime. You’ll roll through Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson desks as your progress your police career and you can expect bigger and tougher cases as things go along. Once you collect your clues, it’s time to talk to witnesses and formulate your plan of attack. By reading the faces of those you’re questioning, you can determine if they’re telling the truth or lying. This is the first game where your human intuition plays the biggest factor in your success - if you can’t tell when people are lying to you, things won’t go too well. Succeed in your questioning and more clues and evidence will present itself, pushing you along the path of solving the case. Peppered in are action sequences from foot and car chases to big shoot outs and fist fights. Fear not - if you’ve sucked at this in the past (which is probably not many of you), you can skip the action sequences if you fail too many times. Neither Justin nor myself ever got to that point, so we can’t confirm how many times you actually need to fail in order to skip.

You can’t go into L.A. Noire with your classic GTA play style - citizens cannot be run over and you can’t just pull your gun and rob people at will. While you can commandeer any car you see, L.A. Noire does quite a bit to differentiate itself. A big change we liked is having your partner drive from location to location instead of running around. Sure, driving around Los Angeles is a lot of fun (and something I do more during free roam while solving Street Crimes), if you rack up much damage while driving to check on a suspect, it’ll detract from your case rating. If you want to get five stars on a case, don’t cause any pileups or drive on the sidewalk. Street Crimes are fun side missions if you’re looking for quicker, action-oriented sections of play, and with forty of them to complete scattered across the various crime desks, you’ll have plenty to go back and complete after you finish all the game’s cases.

On to the bad of L.A. Noire - the controls. Movement is a chore in the game, especially evident during foot chase sequences. On quite a few occasions, I’ve either lost track of a bad guy or got caught up on a dumpster because moving Cole around is akin to driving a Panzer Tank. I’ve seen enormous SUV’s with a better turning radius. The same control issue is noticeable when trying to position yourself over a clue to inspect. Dancing around to get Cole just right will be a frequent affair. It’s a shame that this was overlooked, being that everything else in the game is at such a high level. The other issue I had with the game is small - I wish you could fail cases by not collecting the proper evidence or performing poorly in an interrogation. You can get every question wrong in a major interrogation and still be able to finish any given case, which gives things a bit of a dumbed-down feel in some areas.

Control issues aside, L.A. Noire is a fantastic game. The facial animations introduced here will constantly put a smile on your face, the pacing will keep you entertained, and the story will have you coming back for more. If I didn’t get so frustrated running Cole around, this would easily be a five-star game, but I did yell at the TV enough times to warrant a drop in score. Regardless, you should still pick this up right away. Hopefully Rockstar puts a lot of DLC into the game. I want more cases. Now.