After over a decade of Rockstar making Grand Theft Auto they teamed up with a new unknown developer named Team Bondi to publish a game they spent 7 years developing LA Noire. which is a brand new type of experience where you play as a detective cop in 1940s solving various mysteries. The game takes place in a psuedo open world where you get handheld from location to location, searching the area for clues, then conducting interviews with people to gather information, finally to then try to solve a case. Is it any good as a video game?
The structure of the game is largly the same for the 25 hours you'll be playing it. The game has dozens of cases, which are like self-contained episodes and take about an hour to complete each. Each case is stand alone, and nothing really carries over between them just some plot points. The core gameplay cycle is that a case starts, you get a briefing of what the crime is,then you and your partner drive to the crime scene. In a sense, in this regard it does have similarities with GTA, however - you can simply tell your partner to drive to the scene every single time, so you rarely actually have to spend boring downtime driving back and forth for minutes on end. I was very pleased with this, because everytime you unlock a new area for investigation you can just tell your partner to drive there and you get a quick loading screen and you can continue the progress.
Once you arrive to the crime scene, then usually you are confronted with various different people. You'll have officiers and coroners telling you details, you'll walk around the area tapping the 'Use' button to try to pickup any objects and investigate them for clues. After you spend a few minutes roaming the crime scene back and forth collecting clues, then you interview people and potential suspects. This is I guess the real bulk of the gameplay. Collecting clues, then interviewing people. The game took 7 years to develop and it has a huge 'open world' city, but you're never not on a case and you never really have any motivation or incentive to actually explore it. It feels like a strange relic of past Rockstar developments, like why is there even an open world at all? the game is actually in reality extremely linear and you always know where to go and the objectives are always guided right to you, you can even ask your partner at any time what to do next and he'll tell you. Rockstar themselves even admitted it was a mistake to waste so much time developing this huge open world, with absolutely nothing to do in it. So it seems like a strange mish mash of ideas..
Onto the actual interrogation dialogue system:
Well it operates on a 3 choice system. You talk to the person, then you have to determine if theyre A) Telling the truth B) Doubt (for more information if you think theyre holding back) C) Accuse of lying (which you need to then drop into a sub-menu and provide actual evidence)
At first , this system seems exciting albeit really limited. But very soon you start to feel how shallow and ambiguous it all is. This game is very notable for its state of the art facial motion capture, its impressive even 10 years after its release. Unfortunately thats about the only graphically impressive thing about the game, as the rest of the enviorments feel pretty PS2 era , so its kinda jarring. However the attention to detail is very high such as the interiors are extremely detailed and all of the objects with the zooming in handling mechanic, all of the objects look great. But the frustration of the dialogue system is that many times you'll think you've deducted the right choice, you studied the facial animations properly, you have no reason to doubt this person is lying to you as its just some random suspect that says something banal like "Yeah I knew that guy, use to work with him" and then you say Truth, well apparently he was lying even though his facial animations appeared truthful and there is absolutely no reason to doubt him. And even if you took a chance and doubted him, then it would be opposite and hes telling the truth. Its just a frustrating awkward system that never really feels like you have a grasp and understanding of wtf is the right choice. I mean sometimes it makes sense, and I could suss out the right answers, but other times are just like this and youll be throwing your hands up going "wtf? how did I get that wrong"
Or the times when you know someone is lying obviously, so you accuse them, and present evidence. For example its like "I knew you were at this location" and you go to select evidence proving it, say a written note with his name on it. So you press it , but Oops thats the wrong piece of evidence you should have picked the Piece of clothing evidence. Like wtf? i did it in the wrong order so now it fails me? theres so many times like this where it just feels meaningless and bullshit.
Like dont get me wrong, its kind of an entertaning novelty but it wears thin when its basically the entire bulk of the game, and the interactions and dialogue options are so vauge and frustrating. Especially since you only get one chance and cant re-do them. This is also where the clues come in, as the clues you collect in the enviorment are the pieces of evidence you must use to back up your claim when you hit "Lie" so if you missed a piece of evidence you can choose the wrong one, even though it appears to match the situation.
The interrogations are kind of made even more frustrating by the fact that theres no sort of Log or chance to review the conversations, or re-read the dialogue. So its extremely easy to just get lost/forget what the person just said, and then youre stuck having to choose a dialogue option not knowing WTF is even going on or what the conversation is. This part was very annoying.
For the main part of the game, the interrogations, they feel more ambiguously confusing more than rewarding.
So whats even the consequence of these interrogations? Well heres the awfully stupid part. It almost doesnt even matter what the outcome is. Nothing in the game causes you to fail or unable to progress. No matter how bad you fail interrogations, fail to get clues, make a fool of yourself and kill pedestrians etc, the game just keeps progressing. You dont lose or have to re-do anything or try to go back and re-do an interrogation to get 'the right answer' Everything just progresses like you did anyway. This is really fucking confusing like what do you mean? Why can I keep progressing as if nothing happened? The only penalty you get for 'playing bad' is at the end of a case you get a lower rating, and sometimes a cutscene of your boss getting mad at you. Because of this, nothing really feels like it has a meaningful impact or consequence of your 'skill' ... so as an actual VIDEO GAME the main 'skill' doesnt even really matter, it holds your hand anyway. I mean, its kind of a double edged sword, because I like to just keep progressing and not having to re-do over and over, but it also makes all your interactions feel kind of meaningless. I still tried to get as high of a rating as possible per case, but if I failed countless interviews, it was more like eh whatever.
I think if you fail interviews, it makes the case take slightly longer like you have to do an extra car chase or tail a suspect , but thats about it.
There are four main case desks you work at, Traffic crimes, Homicide, Vice (Drugs and such) , and Arson
By the first 7 or so hours, the game is pretty fun. Doing these investigations are interesting such as a movie star killed in a car that flew off a cliffside, victims of a hit and run, things like this. Then you move onto the Homicide cases which by far are the highlight of the game. Theres a strange, poetic, intellectual, Black Dahlia murder type criminal going around and killing women, leaving mysterious cryptic clues around taunting the player and police, stringing you along on his wild goose chase. This was the highlight of the game I think , as the antagonist was pretty interesting and I genuinely wanted to find out more about him and his mysterious was. And then it comes to an abrupt end when he awkwardly gives himself away inside some church, and you chase him through a sewer and just kill him. Then its onto the next crime desk: Drugs. These cases involve solving a large counterfeit morphine operation, or another case where there is some soup company filling all of its soup cans full of marijuana, but unfortunately by this point the game is getting very boring and wearing out its welcome. Some of the cases are downright boring and I couldnt care about doing them properly, or even figuring out what was going on. Like some fake boxing bid winnings or something?
...so after about the 10 hour mark the game is already old. Its very repetivie, and you get sick of having to do the same boring romp of searching some location for clues and then interrogating people. It just goes on, and on, and on. The game is just simply too long with not enough variation. It wears out its welcome.
This is painfully obvious on the last area, Arson, where you just go around searching the same burnt out buildings trying to figure out why all these houses are seemingly being burnt for the same reason, some kind of higher up conspiracy to purposefully burn houses to make tons of money or something.
So between this loop of getting a case, fast travelling to the crime scene, walking around for 10 mins picking up random objects looking for clues to piece it together, then interviewing people - Sometimes the game willl throw a curve ball in the form of:
Fist fights: sometimes you will have to brawl with enemies and its such a total joke. for these fist fight encounters you can literally do nothing but spam the attack button over and over until you win. ZERO skill. The enemies punch you in the face and it barely matters, you have so much health. Game doesnt have a difficulty selection. So, the fist fights are completely trivial and meaningless
Besides fist fights, sometimes you do engage in gun combat.
The gun combat is similarly a joke. You have an extreme amount of health, which regenerates, and you have infinite ammo. It uses generic cover based mechanics, and it throws enemies at you that just pop in and out of cover for you to shoot them with extremely accurate pistol headshots. Very, very easy. But atleast its a change of pace. You can pickup other weapons, but since you have inifinite ammo, and the default pistol is extremely accurate, theres no need to.
I will say that some of these combat sections feel extremely out of place and bizarre. Like you have this hyper realistic detective nuanced crime solving game that is all about justice and law, and locking away criminals for their horrible crimes, but then sometimes you kick down the door of some compound and you and your partner just mercilessly slaughter waves and waves of random people. Then it ends, and no one bats an eye. No one questions you, you dont get interrogated, you dont feel any consequence for ruthlessly murdering dozens of people at once. Its just so fucking strange and funny.
These gunplay sections do happen a few times throughout the game, and when they happen it is a refreshing breath of air like "oh ok, I just have to do this really piss easy gun section and atleast the body physics and gun shot impacts are satisfying to watch" Because as stated previously, this game is 25 hours long. 25 HOURS LONG.
The game is 25 hours long. Out of those 25 hours, about 18 of them are spent in CUTSCENES and LISTENING TO PEOPLE TALK. the other 4 hours are spent Walking around linear crime scenes spamming 'interact' to look for clues. The last hour is spent shooting / punching people with extremely easy forgiving mechanics. That's what the 'gamplay' pie chart of LA Noire would look like. So for me, its hard to call it a good video game. Its like a video game to play when you dont want to play video games. It's like a video game to play if you want to just listen to people talk and play with 1 hand and be half asleep or drunk and barely pay attention or soemthing. In this regard its kind of a failure as game. Its more like some gimick novelty interactive media experience than an engaging immersive video game. Many points in the game I would be playing half asleep one hand on the controller barely paying attention as im crawling around some crime scene spamming the A button trying to pickup clues, for the 500th time.
Towards the end of the game you suddenly start playing as a completely different character whos affiliated with the main guy, and it was a pretty odd change of things. The story gets kinda weird and convuluted, like the main character has an affair and everyone knows about it and shames him so thats why he gets fired from Homcidie and has to work Arson? it doesnt really make much sense, it just seemed like an obvious story plot to force the character into some other area of investigation. This game is so story heavy, which is weird for me, because I dont review stories, i review gameplay. Im not interested in stories, im interested in gameplay. LA Noire is more of an interactive media involving a detective story, but theres not really much story to speak of in actuality. Its just one disjointed case to another of fantasy crime mysteries. Your main character doesnt really matter, he apparently has a wife and kids but you never see them, and the only relevant plot point with the main character is that he use to be in the army, and that he eventually has an affair which makes all the cops hate you. So my final thoughts are, its a memorable, unique, innovative novelty experience, the facial motion capture is some of the best out there, albeit invoking uncanny valley, and for the first bit of the game all of the mechanics are fresh and interesting - but unfortunately it all wears out its welcome with its huge drawn out 25 hour playtime, its too repetitive for its own good, and the actual core GAMEPLAY mechanics are sorely lacking and you'll find yourself watching cutscenes and listening to random pedestrians talking more than you'll actually be playing a video game
5/10