LA Noire, Rockstar Games and Team Bondi's near seven years in the making love letter to noir cinema and pulp fiction is a hard dame to hate. She's got the looks, she had the plan, and she nearly pulled it off, but what she didn't figure out was her audience digging deeper than the grave: you hit the sewer lines and it ain't pretty.
Gameplay
L.A. Noire comprises of a series of bite-sized cases spread across five desks that chronicle Cole Phelps' journey through the ranks of the LAPD. As a war veteran, you start off as a beat cop and then move on to traffic, homicide, vice and arson. Each desk gives you a different partner to work with, and they're all fleshed out, interesting characters that keep the game experience from stagnating.
Each of these cases has you performing a series of tasks that will hopefully lead you to the perpetrator. These include investigating crime scenes, collecting evidence that you then use to corner suspects during interrogations, and an action beat that has you using your vehicle, weapon or fists to subdue a suspect.
Examining evidence is especially entertaining as the game lets you pick up objects from the game world and inspect them. While not all items can be examined, there are some that can have an amazing degree of detail; enough to make out the serial number off a handgun, for instance. There's some flexibility built into your crime solving, so much so that you can end up accusing the wrong individual, miss clues and even get interrogations wrong. These then lead to new story threads that you wouldn't otherwise have experienced.
The ambience
There's plenty to like about the experience that L.A. Noire weaves. Everything from the menu screens to the music to the open world environment positively drips atmosphere. Post-war Los Angeles just feels right, with Team Bondi using aerial photographs taken in the days before the cloverleaf invasion to model a massive city that you just want to drive through for no reason other than to take in the sights. There are authentic period cars and pedestrians in period dressage on show. Storefronts are true to the time period, and get this - you can sit down anywhere and just take in the view.
You could let your partner chauffer you around during missions, but it's so much better picking out real world landmarks and responding to random street crimes. The neat grid-like street layout makes finding your destination relatively easy, especially since there's no guided navigation of any kind (apart from the location marker). The lack of an automated day/night cycle does sting, but then you do see the time of day (and weather) vary at specific points during the story. There's a beautiful selection of licensed period music and radio shows that pipe in over the radio, along with a small set of original songs by Andrew and Simon Hale.
The interiors sets are meticulous in their detail, deserving a nice tip of the hat for Team Bondi's digital prop wrangler. Weaponry is pleasingly varied and is punchy enough for a game whose focus is clearly on thinking with your mind than your trigger finger. Suspects have a nice solid weight about them as they crumple to the ground, as does Cole while he's doing a bit of parkouring in some of the games' on-foot chases. While there may be some wrigglyness to the driving, you'll soon learn to work with the driving model and its ability to deliver thrilling edge-of-the-seat vehicle pursuits and crunchy crashes.
Team Bondi's path breaking MotionScan works as it says on the can, delivering the most authentic faces ever seen in a video game. You'll be picking your jaw off the floor as you watch a procession of talented television actors (near 400 of them) bring even the smaller two-bit roles to life.
Whether this kind of investment in lieu of more traditional animation techniques is something that'll catch on is another question, however. Also, there's a very evident disconnect between the faces and the bodies of NPCs that were hand-keyed rather than motion captured. The game clocks in at around 20 hours, which is sizable enough in this day and age. Your mileage may vary if you get stuck into hunting down the collectibles or responding to random street crimes. There's also a free roam mode that lets you drive around and indulge your destructive side, especially important given that you're penalised for every traffic infraction you commit during the course of the main story.
Lie to me
Where does it all go wrong then? Let's start with the basic interrogation mechanic. You're given a measly three choices (truth, doubt and lie) of responses during conversations, but it becomes increasingly difficult to predict what Cole will say or what tone he'll take. Also, it's almost too easy to use the lie option since it allows you to back out of a false accusation. You never feel like you have true control over conversations, which hurts a game that's so reliant on conversation.
Reading people's faces isn't nearly as intriguing when they're so obviously acting crafty (twitchy eyes, the works), and what's even more galling is when you're slapped with one red herring after another, with no control over which way to steer your investigation. The cases are set up exactly the way Team Bondi saw fit and damned if you try something you weren't meant to. Also, why does everyone under the slight glare of suspicion become a runner? You'll lose count of the suspects you'll be chasing down just because the game wants to add some action to the proceedings.
A lot of these issues wouldn't have been a problem if the resolution of some of the later story arcs was anywhere near satisfactory. Instead, you're left with muddled, inconceivable, contrived story turns that leave you questioning whether the hours you put into the last few cases could have been put to better use. Saying any more would spoil the story, but suffice to say that what's here just isn't satisfying enough for a discerning gamer. On the other hand, the cases during the beat and traffic desks were much better, because they were designed as compartmentalised nuggets of storytelling.
While these are sizable caveats for a quasi-adventure game that L.A. Noire quite clearly is, it's hard to whole heartedly dissuade gamers from sampling the stellar work Team Bondi has put into so many of its other facets. If only the same love and care that went into its aesthetics had gone into refining the story and the interrogation, we'd have a certified classic on our hands.
Rs 2,499 (Xbox 360)
Rs 2,499 (PS3)
Rating: 4.5/5
Love: Excellent presentation, decent length and sense of progression.
Hate: Clunky storytelling, stilted interrogations
Publisher: Rockstar
Developer: Team Bondi
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3