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Staff review by Gary Hartley
August 13, 2011
Some people don’t want to admit it, but L.A. Noire is a game that’s split a lot of opinion. I’ll fly my colours from the start in this review so that the vocal majority can go home early; it’s questionable to me it should even be called a game at all. I’d call that quite a big negative.
I’ve heard all the aggressive knee-jerk defences before. If you didn’t like the game, you’re not smart enough to grasp the plot, or you were expecting overblown GTA violence like shooting hookers in the face after deciding not to pay for your blowjob. Let’s address that: the plot isn’t exactly Immanuel Kant meets Humphrey Bogart and the underlying angle running parallel through the numerous investigations mainly stays undiscovered because it cheats. Masterminds appear without warning or clue and mock you for not discovering their wicked intentions earlier and turn out to be people you’ve met briefly in passing. The first Big Reveal has you cowering behind pews in a dilapidated church while a madman fires a gun at you and rants endlessly about how he outsmarted you all. Of course I didn’t connect him with the crime – I didn’t remember who he was, such was the brevity of his appearance. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of Cole Phelps’ detective skills is to pick up random shit and turn it slightly to the left.
That the game promised a real attempt to solve crimes was perhaps the biggest draw for me. I’m one of those nerdy kids who still claims Monkey Island is the best thing to happen to home PCs ever, and I still manage to wet myself with excitement every time someone promises to reinvent the genre. Noire hooks up with Phelps shortly after he returns from World War II as a simple patrolman on the streets of L.A., and follows his career highs and lows from there. Although the game continuously tells you that he’s the best damn detective the city has ever seen, he seems to solve crimes by glancing briefly at objects around a crime scene and then yelling at people.
One half of this works much better than the other. Collecting evidence is overly simplified pixel hunting where you run around a crime scene waiting for your pad to vibrate (though you can turn this option off and just pump the examine key like crazy should you prefer). Clues are usually already laid out for you to examine, be they suspicious foot prints, suspicious items or suspicious corpses. You can pick these items up and have Phelps rotate them until something he can already see clearly is slightly clearer. This records it as a genuine clue.
Usually, this takes a matter of minutes. It’s always worth being exhaustive as what seems like a clean cut case can always be blown up by a new discovery. Arrive at the scene of a hit and run, and you find the unfortunate victim quite dead. Root through his pockets and ask the coroner about the odd hole in his chest and you’ll be assured nothing is amiss. Go the extra mile and root around in some back alleys, and you might be fortunate enough to find a bloody knife hidden away in the shadows; go ahead – put two and two together. Your more experienced partner comes up with the mathematical answer of negative seven, and dismisses it as coincidence. Because people hide bloody knives all the time. Next to a corpse. With a gaping hole in his chest.
Likewise, attend the scene of a battered victim obviously bludgeoned to death on an isolated hill and you’ll find a golf putter hidden beneath a bush. Now, I’m not a member of the Hardy Boys or anything, but I’d find that a tad suspicious. It turns out to have no bearing on the case, but if I’m told someone’s skull was caved in with a blunt instrument and such an item was found, out of place and hidden, a few feet away, I’d think it was worthy of note.
Interrogating people works a lot better. The much-touted facial capturing Team Bondi spent months telling us rocks was worth every drop of hype it received, and you could find yourself spending a considerable amount of time staring out computer generated facsimiles of people while you try and decide if they’re lying to you or not. Questioning works by basically listening to a statement and then deciding if you buy it or not based on the person’s nervousness and your knowledge of the situation, so like Phoenix Wright plus several million more dollars investment. Picking the right responses can be tricky against certain people; career criminals don’t tend to give a lot away, but spooked shop workers who have just seen their employee’s brains splatter against the pavement tend to be a bit easier to read. You can choose to believe them and use that trust to coax more out, doubt them and lean on them for more, or outright accuse them of lying. Prompt for the latter, and you’ll need to back that claim up with evidence you’ve already amassed. Get these right, and you’ll perhaps glean new information or force a confession. You could spend ages deliberating on cases; fretting about the evidence trail or pondering the validity of statements. Here’s the kicker; it doesn’t matter a drop.
Fail a case. Go on; just for kicks. Send up the wrong man. Ask all the wrong questions and ignore as much evidence as you can. Miss the obvious stuff and the game won’t let you progress, but advance lazily and you can mess up it. You’ll know it if you charge the wrong guy; your superiors will also know it and they’ll chew you out, telling you you’re a disgrace to the uniform and that all your hype is a joke. They’ll threaten to rip the badge from your chest while your allotted partner shakes his head in undisguised shame and disgust. Then you start a new case, and all is forgotten in a second. You’re the golden boy again and you’ve never dropped a case – it must be true; random passers-by tell you. L.A. Noire will never punish your incompetence. If it did, it might derail the plot!
All you ever stand to lose is a few stars on a meaningless case rating.
This isn’t a progression of a genre; it’s de-evolution. In 1996’s Broken Sword mistakes led to dead ends or even death, and still managed to advocate a much more gripping tale than Noire’s able to advance. If you were stupid or lazy, then you got a Game Over screen you knew you deserved. It gave gravity to the proceedings, and this is something Noire lacks completely. It’s obsessed with telling Cole Phelps’ tale, and woe betide any obstacle that gets in the way. Bondi built a fantastic virtual replica of 1940’s L.A., then gives you no reason to visit even a fraction of it, keeping you penned into to linear, secluded areas in an effort to reign total focus in on Cole’s odyssey. Side missions are present, but can be all comfortably beaten in a matter of minutes and work seemingly at odds with the main plot at times. Still somewhat shaken by the war, Cole is nevertheless driven by a strong moral code, rightfully wanting to unleash justice without the heavy-handed approach his more experienced colleagues subscribe to. Then he’s ploughing bullets into the spine of purse thieves simply because the game gives you no other solution to halt something akin to a slight misdemeanour when put side by side with the game’s main cases.
Noire‘s huge list of voice actors all do a wonderful job on the artistic direction of the entire title’s cast, but the game becomes tangled and muddy. It punishes you if you show the same level of cynicism as Phelps when other detectives ignore ‘the bigger picture’ and asks you to take pride in a completed investigation you already know has led to the wrong conviction. It’s doubly insulting that if you do this because the plot requires to, you get a hearty slap on the back and you’re hailed as the best. If you do this out of incompetence, you’re told you suck. Then you’re, once again, hailed as the best anyway.
L.A. Noire is as ambitious as it is broken, presenting yet another game where you spend way too much time driving around a fantastically realised landscape while your passenger pleads with you to slow down, taking nothing but claustrophobic pre-planned routes that only showcases 10% of the game’s world with zero reason to stray outside the beaten path. It promises you a thinking man’s game, but then rigidly scripts things so heavily that any satisfaction you might gleam by piecing together clues is buried under the ever advancing plot, lurching and rolling towards you like the end of days. It’s just as well it’s not an awful story because there’s nothing you can do but watch it, even if that means that, unlike most other games out there, you can never truly be a part of it.
Evolution is supposed to help us rise out of the mud. Not have us roll around in it all day and be told it‘s the future.
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