L.A. Noire Review

18 May 2011 at 14:30:00 by John Robertson
Systems used to review this title: (PS3, 360)

Los Angeles never gets cold in summer. Even in the dead of night the still, dry air holds enough heat to render overcoats redundant. The City of Angels, where nobody is left in the cold.

It was exactly this kind of night that started it all. I don’t know a lot - a car gently rolled to a stop at the tip of a ridge overlooking the heart of the city, a woman was hauled out by a man and deliberately, casually, beaten to death with a blunt instrument before (or after, perhaps) suffering the indignation of having obscenities scribbled the length of her torso with vivid red lipstick.

She was pretty once, that much is clear. She’s not pretty now. She deserved better, anybody deserves better than that.

This kind of set-up is common in L.A. Noire, providing the catalyst for much of its narrative progression. Dark, moody, violent, uncompromising. I’m beginning by talking about the narrative because it’s far and away the game’s most important and compelling element, it’s L.A. Noire’s start, middle and end.

Every action you make comes back to the narrative. This is not a game about scoring points, driving fast, hunting for meaningless pick-ups/collectables or racking up a kill count. This is a game about experiencing a story, experiencing a world and experiencing its inhabitants.

Obviously, your experience of the world and its inhabitants is viewed through a filter of crime. It tends to work that way as an employee of the LAPD. As former “Jap-fighting” US Marine Cole Phelps, you work your way through the ranks from uniformed beat cop to detective within the traffic, homicide, vice and arsine divisions of LA's finest. The opening beat cop sections act as little more than a fancy tutorial, highlighting how to investigate crime scenes, question/interrogate witnesses and suspects, handle yourself in a fist fight and shoot a weapon. After an hour or so you're promoted to traffic detective and set out into the game proper.

Each case is set up as a self-contained story unto itself, with a conclusion that may or may not feed into the bigger picture. These cases can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours to work through on your first attempt, making them feel like individual episodes of a TV show. Indeed, L.A. Noire is perhaps best experienced in a TV-esque manner, one episode a night, to allow you to properly absorb the subtleties and sub-texts of the plot.

Almost all cases follow the same basic structure of crime scene investigation, witness/suspect compiling, questioning, arresting and interrogation. Gathering evidence at the crime scene is performed by speaking to others already present (generally the coroner and officer first on the scene) and by hunting for clues. Crime scenes that you come across early-on have already been given a going over by other detectives, major clues already highlighted with yellow 'evidence markers.' Once you rise the ranks a little further, and find yourself the first detective to give an area the once over, evidence hunting becomes a lengthier process.

That’s not to stay it’s a difficult process, it’s not, but it certainly takes longer. It’s in these moments where L.A. Noire starts to feel like a point-and-click adventure; combing crimes scenes (which can be rather large and not always clearly defined) keeping your eyes peeled to the floor, walls and trash-cans waiting for that control pad to initiate its tell-tell, ‘clue is close’, vibration.

L.A. Noire does away with a visible user interface almost entirely. Team Bondi’s reasoning for this decision is simple and sound, it would ruin the aesthetic of Los Angeles circa 1947 that they’ve worked so hard to get right. And they’re right, it does ruin it – a quick hop into the menu to turn on clue indicators etc and the magic of playing a detective, the magic of feeling like a real character within a real world, vanishes.

Instead, by default, music plays while you’re investigating a crime scene to signify that you’ve not yet found all of the important clues. Once all have been found a few notes play to let you know as much. There may be more clues that you’ve not yet found but you’ve at least got enough to progress.

The lack of traditional ‘gaming’ elements makes L.A. Noire much easier to accept as a work of literature, as opposed to a third-person romp around an open-world city killing bad guys (as it would no doubt have become in less sensitive and imaginative hands). Ammo counters, ‘current weapon’ indicators, X/10 clues found stats being paraded in front of your face would have made it seem childish and compromised.

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