L.A. Noire Review

From start to finish, LA Noire feels like a film – LA Confidential, in fact, along with any similarly hard-boiled example of film noir adapted from stories by the likes of Chandler and Hammett. Set in a gloriously convincing depiction of Los Angeles in 1947 (which is much more attractive than today’s LA), it casts you as Cole Phelps, returning war hero turned cop.

Instantly, you plunge deeply and satisfyingly into his working life, solving a vast number of cases as he becomes the LAPD’s poster-boy, first in Homicide, then in Vice. And your immersion in Phelps’ affairs ratchets up even further when he is hung out to dry by his dubious superiors.

There have been plenty of games with cinematic pretensions in the past, so what is it that enables LA Noire to make a transcendental leap? Inevitably, technology is involved: the new MotionScan system used to capture actors’ performances simply produces more convincing facial animation than we have ever seen in a game.

Couple that with the obsessive attention to detail for which Rockstar’s existing games such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are famed, and the end result rings true to a greater extent than anything that has gone before. The familiar need to suspend disbelief has been all but eliminated.

Gameplay

LA Noire’s gameplay capitalises cleverly on this breakthrough technology. Essentially, it sees you playing through Phelps’s working life, doing what you imagine a real-life LAPD detective would have done in 1947. Thus, you have to drive to crime scenes, root around for clues and examine bodies, then follow the resulting leads.

It’s when you question suspects and witnesses that things get interesting. You have to analyse facial responses and bodily tics like a poker-player seeking tells, then choose one of three tones to adopt for each question. These are marked Truth, Doubt and Lying, but Sympathetic, Dubious and Accusatory would perhaps be more rigorous.

If you accuse a suspect of lying, you must back that up by producing evidence (all accessed, along with along with your records of each case and details of suspects from your standard cop’s notebook). If you don’t adopt the correct tone, the character you’re quizzing will, at the very least, take longer to give you the crucial information you seek.

As you rise through the ranks, you earn Intuition points, which can be cashed in to eliminate one wrong question-tone (or reveal the location of all the clues at a location). Luckily, LA Noire is pretty forgiving, so if your body language-assessment skills aren’t up to CSI standards, you should still get the right result in the end, although you risk a chewing-out from your boss for shoddy police work, which is genuinely mortifying.

Pace

The game’s pacing and narrative arc impress as much as its believability. The bog-standard detective work, fun though it is, is punctuated judiciously by action sequences including car chases, pursuing suspects on foot, climbing around inaccessible areas, puzzle-solving and, of course, shoot-outs.

Between cases, you either get a flashback to Phelps’ war experiences in Japan or a glimpse into his off-duty life; both those elements end up feeding back into the overarching storyline. The oeuvres of Shelley and even anarchist author Piotr Kropotkin are fed into the mix. Newspapers that you find when hunting for clues trigger yet another backstory (this time involving ongoing LA skullduggery), which yet again intersects with the main storyline in the game’s later stages.

A fascinating snapshot of an America struggling to readjust to everyday life in the aftermath of the second world war emerges, reinforced by the attitudes of your fellow cops (many of whom would be ejected from the Sweeney for political incorrectness, although Phelps’s keen sense of morality keeps them sufficiently in check to appease modern moral arbiters seeking outrage).

Since you’re at the centre of proceedings, participating in and dictating the action, the overall effect is powerfully immersive. Cleverly, Rockstar has ensured that LA Noire is a thoroughly inclusive game, too. The control system is sufficiently simplified that even the most determined non-gamers shouldn’t find it intimidating.

Indeed, the more hardcore gamers may carp that it isn’t sufficiently action-packed or precise. The one criticism that could be levelled at the game is that the shooting system has been over-simplified so that it feels clunky compared to the likes of Grand Theft Auto.

Depth and meatiness

LA Noire largely does away with the free-roaming that enhanced the appeal of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. As you drive around, you do occasionally hear of street crimes to which you can respond, and there are hidden vehicles and LA landmarks that completists can collect and visit, but the overwhelming focus is on the main story.

So it’s a good job that, bucking the modern trend for short single-player games, LA Noire is satisfyingly meaty. Rockstar reckons it’s roughly equivalent in length to two seasons of a TV series, a claim that feels roughly accurate.

Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to argue that LA Noire more closely approximates a television show than a film – it beats any film hands down in terms of the sheer amount of entertainment on offer, which of course is an advantage games have always had over films.

It has all the period charm of Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men – indeed, the role of Phelps is played by Mad Men’s Aaron Staton and other digitised Mad Men actors crop up sporadically – and it seasons the gameplay with a healthy dash of CSI.

In the past, games with such overwhelming ambitions have floundered on odd, usually peripheral, aspects that jarred – such as unrealistic animation (and especially facial animation), clunky dialogue, poor virtual camerawork or facile characterisation. LA Noire is the first game to lack any such element which naggingly reminds you that you’re playing a video game, rather than strolling through a film or TV series.

That’s why it marks a breakthrough for games as a whole – and I can’t wait to see what Rockstar does with LA Noire’s technology in its other blockbuster franchises.