Lisvender reviews LA Noire
Developed by Rockstar Games and Team Bondi. Available on XBox 360 and Playstation 3.
L.A. Noire is an experimental adventure game that combines the investigation of Phoenix Wright with Rockstar open-world action. You get a hell of a lot more “adventure” out of it than “action,” though, as the primary challenges of the game boil down to looking at things. While it provides a unique experience for players, I can’t help but feel that it was made chiefly to raise the standards for photorealism and drama in video games, to tamp down Rockstar’s rebellious image, and perhaps, to sell technology. As I played, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Boy, this really looks to legitimize video games as a popular form of entertainment.” If that’s the sort of thing you want your games to do, you will absolutely love L.A. Noire.
The tireless Rockstar hype machine has already ensured that the entire human population knows the premise of this game by now, so I won’t belabor it here. The year is 1947: a time when clothes were bright, everyone smoked, and cars were big enough to stand up in. We have our usual crime novel cliches: the ambitious, idealistic cadet, the jaded, two-fisted homicide vet, the very Irish police captain who calls people “boyo,” and the cocky, clue-dropping killer. Coincidences are commonplace: most of your police work just happens to tie into one massive scheme that stretches from the alleys of small-time hoods to the grandest manors of power. You’re always in just the right department and assigned to just the right cases to intersect with it. Standard-issue detective stuff, right?
Thankfully, Rockstar knows how to get through the formula and still deliver a worthwhile story. There’s none of that adolescent navel-gazing that Hideo Kojima has led us to expect. As video games go, the tale of L.A. Noire is top rate. The actors are excellent, the musical score evocative, and the dialogue true. While we get a pinch of preach towards the end, most of the story is presented with tasteful restraint, and a few of the cutscenes approach brilliance in their delivery and timing. A lot of the story is also told using now-popular video game techniques: walk-and-talks, conversations while driving, collectibles that reveal optional cutscenes, and the odd protagonist shift. In a game that was marketed on starring a real actor, this latter trick is jarring, and I daresay unnecessary, but it works in that it supports the story’s themes of loyalty and partnership.
Much has been made of the MotionScan technology that makes the character faces look more realistic than any yet seen in video games. Video of actors’ faces is textured around the meshes of the character models in a method similar to that used in the Playstation 2 game Siren. You’d create a similar effect if you projected video of a speech onto a bust. Ignoring the usual teeny artifacts you might expect from the recorded textures, the technique works wonders in selling the characters. It captures twitches, creases, and other subtleties that most animators overlook. I don’t know if this is the future of video games, though, as it sure seems like a complex and time-consuming process. It also appears to eat up a lot of data, as the XBox 360 version of the game had to be split across three discs. Still, the precedent has been set, and I expect that the race for realism will only accelerate from here.
Strangely, while the characters are amazing, the rest of the game is a little bland. The artists obviously did a lot of research to get the cars, clothing, and buildings to look authentic, but the rich and realistic coloring that made Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption so striking is absent from this game. Driving around Los Angeles, you’ll notice that much of it has a flat, uniform coloration, and worse, lots of pop-in. It doesn’t look bad; it just doesn’t look as good as Rockstar could have made it. Clearly, the open world is not where the developers focused their efforts this time around, but it’s not a serious problem, as most of the game takes place in impressively detailed interior settings, which are well-lit and moody, and look great.
L.A. Noire is comprised of twenty-one criminal cases that shuffle you across five different departments. Your character, Cole Phelps, starts out as a patrolman, and then soon becomes a detective in traffic, homicide, vice, and arson. Your captain assigns you cases, you open up your little notebook to pick a place to check out, and then you and a partner hit the bricks of Los Angeles, in search of clues and people of interest.
Gathering clues involves walking Cole around a house, an apartment, or a small field. When Cole nears a possible clue, a piano sting plays and the controller vibrates. Press A (or X), and Cole will investigate the nearby hotspot. Sometimes the object you find will be needless, and Cole will say something to that effect. Other times, its a damned important clue, in which case the game will prompt you to either turn, twist, open, unfold, or otherwise manipulate the object in order to find a necessary detail. You do this by either pressing the A/X button, or by tilting the left analog stick to view the object from a very specific angle. The controller vibrates and the camera zooms in when you get it right.
This whole angle thing can be aggravating at times, because the game requires you to keep the stick in the correct position for a little over a second before Cole actually “sees” the clue, and if you mess up and slip, you have to keep tilting to find the magic spot again. Indeed, hunting down clues gets tedious; it is by no stretch the glamorous work CSI makes it out to be. The game is kind enough, however, to play a musical cue once all the case-related items in an area are located, so you won’t have to waste any excess time in one place. You will want to hear that cue before you move on, though, because the stuff you find will unlock people to talk to, locations to visit, and evidence to be used in catching lies.
Also, missing clues affects your case rating, and this is annoying.
About those lies: everyone is a liar in L.A. Noire. There isn’t a single character in the game that doesn’t withhold something from you. When Cole steps up to interview a person of interest, you’d do well not to believe everything you’re told. During an interview, you get to choose from a list of topics built from the clues you’ve collected. When the suspect answers, you have to decide whether he or she is telling the truth, holding something back, or just flat out lying. You determine this by the way the character behaves. If all you see is a blank stare, it’s safe to assume you’re getting the truth. If you’ve got fidgeting, lip-biting, and eye-shifting going on, then you know that something is amiss.
Now, here’s proof that questionable design will overshadow expensive tech on any day of the week. You’ll know that you handled a question correctly by a short piano sting. If it ends in a high tone, you got it right. If it ends in a low tone, you screwed up. Either way, the topic is then scratched from your list, and you can’t ask about it again. So your suspect is sweating, but you’re still not certain about whether to choose the “Doubt” option or the “Lie” option. If you choose Doubt, and the interviewee is actually lying, you get the low tone, your experience point bonus is reduced, your case rating is marred, and you are forced to move on to the next question without a second chance.
If you choose Lie, things get complicated. Cole flips to the Evidence page in his notebook, and you have to pick the clue that contradicts the statement your suspect just made. Sometimes, this is easy, like when the suspect says he wears size 10 shoes even though you found size 8 shoes in his apartment. Other times, it’s confusing as all hell. First, your mind might interpret your clues in a way that creates a contradiction that the designers didn’t intend, and the evidence that you thought was damning will turn out to be 100% wrong. Second, there’s the constant, nagging possibility that you missed a clue somewhere before starting the interview, and that you’ve charged into a battle of wits without any ammo. The game doesn’t warn you when you’ve done this, so you may very well recognize the suspect is nervous, peruse your evidence, see that nothing looks contradictory to what he/she just said, and then choose “Doubt,” only to get the failure tone for seemingly no reason! It’s fucking maddening.
Precious leads and locations can be lost to your knowledge if you botch an interview, and you don’t get to retry an interview without restarting the entire case. After a few hours of reliving cases in order to get them right, I didn’t care about the MotionScan gimmicks anymore; I just wanted to throttle the designer who thought it was a good idea to prevent players from repeating questions.
The prospect of a Rockstar game that centers on building cases might perplex you. Trust me, I felt the same way, particularly when I reached the part that requires you to do record referencing and math. No, I’m not joking. Rockstar throws us a bone, though, in the form of miniature action sequences. Occasionally, a person of interest won’t be so thrilled about a visit from the LAPD, and he (it’s always a he) will tear off. Never a wise thing to do, as Cole has been training at the Assassins’ School of Free Running. During these foot chase sequences, all you have to do is hold the right trigger and steer a bit with the left stick, and Cole will automatically vault fences, climb ladders, and jump from rooftop to rooftop. The chases always end with the suspect getting stuck in a dead end somewhere, but if you’re savvy, you can catch the guy early by keeping your gun trained on him for a few seconds to fire a warning shot, or by catching up to him and tackling him.
Suspects also try to escape in cars, causing similar chases. Again, these always end with the suspect crashing somewhere, but you can catch them quick by smashing them off the road, or by staying near enough to your target for your partner to shoot out the tires. You get trophies/achievements for cutting chases short, which is neat.
Driving is generally fun, and it feels good, but you’re really going to want to keep your siren on at all times. Since you’re playing a policeman, it looks bad when you smash your car into things or run people over. Every bit of damage you cause affects your case rating. This means that you have to stay in proper lanes and pay attention to stoplights. Your siren does a decent job of getting people out of the way, but you’ll still get slammed by moronic drivers here and there. Remember Grand Theft Auto, and how the police could arrest you if you ran into them? Not here. If some idiot hits you in L.A. Noire, the only person who gets penalized is you!
You can take out your anger on troublemakers by getting into fistfights and shootouts with them. Fistfights are a lot more fun here than they are in Red Dead Redemption. Every hit has a strong, heavy feel, and it’s satisfying to dodge an enemy punch and then counter. The only weird thing about the brawling is that the character faces don’t animate in response to being hit. You can sock a guy in the nose and send him to the floor, but you won’t see any change in his expression.
The shootouts are excellent, too. You move in on druggies and robbers with gun out and up, slipping from cover to cover, and waiting for your targets to pop out. Familiar as it sounds, it’s still damn exciting. Your standard issue pistol is no peashooter, and when combined with Rockstar’s trademark auto-aim, it can drop a gang of criminals in a flash. You can grab other guns from fallen enemies if you wish, including shotguns, high-powered rifles, and military-grade automatics, but they’re not as accurate or as powerful as the pistol.
The funny thing is that if you have trouble with any of the case-related action sequences, the game offers to let you skip them with no penalty to your case rating. The fact that you can skip the action with impunity, but can’t make a single mistake in the interviews without damaging your score, should tell you what market Rockstar is aiming for with this game.
If your trigger finger is still itchy, you can answer calls to street crimes that come in on your car radio. These aren’t required, as they don’t relate to the story at all, but they can be refreshing if you get sick of looking for clues. If you’re not sick of looking for clues, however, these constant, distracting calls can rip you at the nerves, and if you ignore them, you miss out on precious, precious experience points.
Yes, L.A. Noire has an experience system, one that sees Cole rising through twenty different “ranks.” You earn experience points by completing interviews correctly, stopping street crimes, or by engaging in the game’s scavenger hunts. Scattered across Los Angeles are golden film cans, city landmarks, and stashed vehicles. These collectibles function as typical video game busywork, but the experience they provide is useful. With every Rank Up, you are rewarded with outfits that provide stat bonuses, the revelation of hidden vehicles on your map, or with valuable Intuition points.
Intuition points are investigation aids. You can keep up to five at one time, and you use them while clue hunting or interviewing. Using one while clue hunting will reveal the locations of all case-relevant clues on your minimap. This is nice, as it spares you the boredom of wandering a crime scene in search of that last little shred of evidence the game wants you to find. Using an Intuition point during an interview narrows down your choices in handling a question. You can either have an incorrect choice removed from the screen, or you can have the game refer to your console’s network to see how other players handled the question. It’s really quite clever and useful, but if you want to take advantage of these helpful hints, you’d better prepare your nose for the XP grindstone.
L.A. Noire is not the paradigm shift that the ads say it is. I can’t even say that it’s the best thing that Rockstar has ever done. Its impressive storytelling is upstaged by frustrating interviews, rigid driving rules, and tired video game mainstays. I admit that most of my disappointment is with Rockstar, simply because the game is not what I expected. It’s sad to see a hardcore developer cater to the casuals, and focus on making the cutscenes more voluminous and groundbreaking than the interactive parts. Still, that doesn’t take anything away from L.A. Noire as an adventure game. It’s a good, strong adventure game, one that benefits from a grander budget than most other entries in the genre. The story is good enough that I was continually drawn to it, and interested enough to see it through to the end. Unlike Rockstar’s recent hits, I don’t think I’ll ever want to play L.A. Noire again, but that single playthrough was a memorable one, one that marks a unique transitional, and hopefully transitory, period in the history of video games.
Controller1.com rating: 2/3
