GAMING
Critical Gamer reviews the latest games
games reviews L.A. Noire
* Format: 360 (version reviewed), PS3 * Unleashed: Out Now * Publisher: Rockstar * Developer: Team Bondi * Players: 1
* Site:
http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire
were right or wrong, and this is just the first of many things which will slowly eat away at the enjoyment you will have with this game.
Set in 1940s Los Angeles, L.A. Noire plac- es you in the role of Cole Phelps, a deco- rated war hero making his way up through the ranks of the LAPD. Players achieve this by getting involved in crime scenes, looking for clues, piecing together puzzles, tailing people, interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects.
Most of Noire will have you involved in the various steps of investigation, with the interviews and interrogations being the key selling points due to the facial animation technology. Boasting the ability accurate they meant everyone looking like they have a lisp) the game expects you to and thus be able to guess whether or not they are telling the truth. The doubt option is particularly vague, and can at times have totally random outcomes. Optional musical chimes will tell you if you have guessed correctly (though you can guess by what is said either way).
Unfortunately there are problems with this flaw of instantly telling you whether you
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The first problem is that accusing some- body of lying is only successful if you have proof to back it up (realistic at least); but there are times when you have multiple pieces of evidence which, while all cir- cumstantial when separate, prove abso- lute guilt when combined. The game does not allow you to do this and forces you to guess which it wants you to pick. There are also ridiculous accusations of murder thrown about by Cole if you spot a provable lie of minor importance. The game cannot tell the difference between you believing someone to be a liar and be- lieving that they are a murderer. It feels as if Team Bondi has assumed that the player is unintelligent, to be blunt.
The worst crime occurs during the homi- cide cases; it is infuriatingly obvious even within the first case that a serial killer is getting away with murder and that you are going after the wrong people, yet the game arrogantly thinks it has fooled you climaxes to a plot we have ever seen. It even goes one step further by lying to the player. Cutscenes at the start of the homi- cide cases show the murder happening and go so far as to use character models of suspects within the case carrying out the kill, even though it later retroactively surprise.
Another major gripe is in the replay option. Noire uses a similar checkpoint system
to GTA IV, yet it only applies if you die or otherwise do something that utterly ruins the case (kill a hostage by mistake for example) yet there is no option to reload a checkpoint if you want to try again at correctly spotting all lies. The game ex- pects you to restart the whole case if you want to do this and of course even if you get through the interview you messed up, there might be more within the same case We would be less harsh on the core me- chanics of Noire if it had something else to fall back on, but all there is is a limited range of very repetitive, short cases that are spread across all desks which you will not be inclined to replay. The one area it shines in is the voice work which, for the most part, is stellar.
The core mechanics are flawed, the slow pacing and predictability of the plot remove any momentum to push you towards the end, and the bottom line is that there is not interesting enough. If you are looking for a superior lie-spotting, crime-solving experi- ence we would recommend the Phoenix very little to do in it, then by all means buy L.A. Noire.
written by Critical Gamer’s Ian Dawson
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