Review: LA Noire

LA Noire is a sandbox adventure game focused on mystery solving, with a few third-person shooter elements, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. It was developed by Team Bondi and Rockstar Games.

Cole Phelps shooting at some robbers.

Cole Phelps is an up and coming detective in post-World War Two Los Angeles. Phelps will have to deal with corruption on the streets of LA and within the police force if he wants to keep his job.

LA Noire is made up of cases based on what department Detective Phelps is working in: traffic, homicide, vice, and arson.

At the start of a case, Phelps and his current partner will be told to go to a crime scene. At the scene the player will have to look around and examine pieces of evidence, indicated by the controller rumbling (I do not know what the PC version does, but I assume something similar happens). If whatever Cole looks at really is evidence, Cole will comment on it and make a note in his notebook. When all evidence is found a musical cue will play and Cole will have to interview a witness or a suspect.

Phelps at a crime scene.

Interviews are conducted with a list of questions based on the evidence found. Cole will ask a question, the witness will answer, the player will decide whether the person is telling the truth, hiding something, or lying, and Cole will press the witness based on what the player chooses. If the player chooses correctly, the witness will give up more information that gives Phelps more clues.

When a person is hiding something they will, in theory, do things like shift around or move their hands, and the player will know to choose the “Doubt” option or the “Lie” option. If they are lying Cole will have a clue that contradicts their statement, and the player can present the clue to get more information.

A person being interrogated.

After Phelps is done interviewing the person, he will have enough information to drive to another place in Los Angeles, and either find more clues or talk to more people. Cole keeps collecting clues and interviewing witnesses and suspects until he arrests someone and the case is over.

There a few side games that the player will run into while investigating a case. A suspect will try to escape on foot or in a car and Cole will have to chase him down, a suspect will try to fistfight Cole, or Cole will get into a shootout. The first two easy and forgettable; the shootouts play like a third-person shooter. They are kind of fun, but it is hard to ignore the way people barely react when Cole shoots them.

The biggest problem with LA Noire is the interview sections. There are too many problems in figuring out the right way to press a suspect that the player cannot control. The player is supposed to figure out if the person is lying by watching for a tell like averting their eyes, but witnesses will lie and look normal or look shifty and tell the truth. When a witness is lying the player is supposed to present evidence that shows a contradiction, but while the player can see how evidence Cole has would show a contradiction, the game will not think in the same way the player does and penalize the player. The discussion leading up to the evidence presentation will imply the player is supposed to present one type of evidence to prove the contradiction, but does not work in the end. Or the description of the evidence in Cole’s notebook will not give enough detail to show how it can contradict.

                                       

There really should not have been a doubt option. If there was only “truth” and “lie-proven-by-evidence” options, the player would not have to deal with the developer’s inability to convey subtle emotion.

Not that it matters. It is impossible to make a mistake that prevents the player from completing a case. Phelps can miss a ton of evidence and fail to press a witness on the correct answer to several questions, and Cole will still somehow know where to go to next, and eventually arrest the right person. It might be for the best though; none of these cases are interesting enough that, if you were penalized, you would want to go through them again.

 

Looking for clues at a crime scene is not difficult, but not fun. It is easy busywork.

The story is not noir for the most part. Just because the setting involves mysteries in a big city in the 1940s does not make it noir. There needs to be a certain bleakness, and personal stake on the part of the main character to be noir. Phelps conducts most of the case with a detached professionalism, which is boring to watch.

Individual cases play out like episodes from a run-of-the-mill police drama. It is not until the last three cases that Phelps gets a more personal involvement, and the story becomes somewhat noir like. For most of the game though it is hard to get invested in the cases.

Cole Phelps is a sanctimonious but otherwise bland main character. His partners are varying levels of stupid and corrupt. All of the suspects and witnesses, except for the really sick ones, are unmemorable. There are a couple of recurring characters that stick in your mind, but that is it.

Bondi and Rockstar worked really hard to make their characters look like their voice actors, but their work did not accomplish anything, the characters still do not look like real people. Bondi and Rockstar should have spent more time coming up with some way to make the characters distinguishable from one another.

LA Noire’s saving grace is that it is very easy to get through. Otherwise it is an example of a game  that tried to do something unheard of but did not think it through, with a mediocre story, characters, and setting. The story gets a little better near the end, but that not justify the first twenty hours of the game.