In one way, it’s a great game, but as a crime fiction story alone it checks all the boxes.
Dramatically and thematically, LA Noire ticks all the boxes of a perfect crime fiction story. The hard-boiled, gritty take on post-war America resembles the crime works of Faulkner and Chandler, with the 21st century edge of LA Confidential.
Just as LA Confidential is a film, LA Noire plays out more like a movie than a game – and that’s not a criticism. The hours of cutscenes play seamlessly into the action, moving more like an interactive movie than a video game.
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Players take control of Cole Phelps, the fallible war-‘hero’ who sets to make a name for himself in the LAPD in 1947. Players traverse the vast concrete jungle of LA in open-world style, typical to much of Rockstar’s line-up, and go about investigating crime scenes and interviewing witnesses to solve cases.
A note here: the open-world environment is one you won’t really make the most of before new downloadable content fills the space with a few more missions, though the sheer detail and size of the map (which isn’t just made up of simple replicas of the same house over and over) draws in the realism. Now, back to the point.
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It’s basically a 3D reimagining of the Phoenix Wright franchise (minus the cutesy wit) from Nintendo DS – go about searching for clues to solve cases and watch the story roll out case by case, until an overarching conspiracy is uncovered. It draws you in, makes you like (or despise) the characters, and holds your attention until the climax.
Like many modern classics, our detective is anything but infallible, and World War II flashbacks parallel the ongoing crime drama and reveal a darker side to our good detective’s past.
It’s not all crime scene detective work though. There’s the interspersed drop of action thrown in, with shoot outs, car chases, fisticuffs and on-foot pursuits.
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The fighting and gun-toting action sequences aren’t the most fluid pieces of gameplay out there, and car chases feel overly scripted. On the bright side, the duck and cover shoot-out style is made smooth with auto-aim.
While the action tends to feel a little too forced, it does go towards delivering that all-round movie feel that, in the end, makes the game so watchable.
These action sequences also tend to be frustratingly short-lived, especially when up against long sequences of driving or cutscenes. Thrown in ‘side-quests’ that you can optionally go for outside of the main story are a welcome addition for longevity’s sake, but these cases are way too flippant and transient.
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And repetitious – more often than not you’ll hit a domestic dispute or robbery that ends begins and ends in a chase or short-lived gunfight.
Back to the brighter side of the dark world of LA Noire, the much-hyped facial recognition used in the making of the game meets the hype and then some. The all-star cast gets to show its true talent in the interrogation room, where players listen to testimonies and base their responses and accusations on a character’s nervous twitch or unsure eyes. It’s not always very subtle, but it’s unparalleled in any other game.
The gameplay is diverse and keeps the interest up outside of just the story. At one moment you’ll be sifting through a crime scene for clue flipping through a ledger or your notebook, and on another you’ll be running through decaying and collapsing movie sets or running from a murderous bulldozer.
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LA Noire plays out thematically similar to the decadent and corrupt world of Chinatown. Greed and lust penetrate every part of society, and money leads. As with most modern crime fiction, there’s a bittersweet denouement to close, but where LA Noire takes the story here is both original and captivating.
In one way, it’s a great game, but as a crime fiction story alone it checks all the boxes.
