L.A.Noire Review

I finished up the game a couple nights ago and after dwelling on it some, here are my final thoughts. I'm going to restate some of the stuff I already wrote in my impressions just to get it all in one spot. Final play time was 18 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds. That includes all story missions and 20/40 side missions.

You play as Cole Phelps, WWII hero from the Pacific, husband and father. You start out your career with the LAPD as a Patrol Officer, then move on to Traffic, then Homicide, followed by Ad Vice and finally Arson.

THE GOOD

-Sound, sound effects, and music. They really did a great job with the sound design. Sirens wailing in tunnels, echoing sounds spot on. Voices sound different in alleys and museums. Footsteps echo cleanly on the marble floors of the Hall of Records. Gunshots are appropriately loud and accurate. Shotguns are noticeably "boomier" than handguns. BARs sound like BARs. The music is well-composed and varied, with the typical trumpet and piano solos aplenty complemented by more punchy stuff for the action scenes.

-Motion scan. The technique results in the most accurate facial "animations" in video game history. There's more detail in the faces than I've ever seen and they just look more "real."

-Interrogations. You gather all the clues you can find and then grill your witnesses to try to get some more answers. You ask them a question and then, judging from their answer, decide whether they are telling the truth, whether they're hiding something, or whether they're flat-out lying. If you do accuse them of lying, you have to have hard evidence to prove it or else they'll clam up and make the rest of your case more difficult. It's fun but it's not really a perfect system. I feel like sometimes when I chose "doubt" he would just go a little too far with his accusation/come on a little too strong. It was like he and his partner were doing "good cop/bad cop".....without the "good cop" part.

-The city of Los Angeles. It's recreated pretty darn well here. It's only a portion of the city, but it's still a pretty huge section of land to play around in. You can drive from one end to the other with no loads or anything, either. Pretty neat. Your cases will take you to wide variety of locales, too. One that comes to mind right away is the set of the famous film "Intolerance." Also, the Tar Pits, Griffith Park, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and the "Hollywoodland" sign is ever-present in the background.

-Voice acting. I found it to be pretty solid throughout. There was ONE character that bothered me. I didn't think it would be too big of a deal, but he ended up playing a larger role than I thought he would. He just has one of those fake southern accents that sounds vaguely like a British accent mixed with a Cajun one. I'm pretty sure nobody ever talked like that and it's just a Hollywood creation. A really annoying one, too.


THE BAD

-The controls. Number one on the "bad" list MUST be the controls. I've harped on it enough, but here it is again: the controls in Rockstar's games SUCK. While on foot, it feels like you're trying to steer around an elephant on a skateboard. It's terrible. There is no reason why I should have to hold or tap one of the face buttons to get my character to move around faster or slower. A simple tilt of the joystick is all it should take. Move it a little bit to walk, full tilt to run. I haven't read any other reviews of the game so I don't know if this is an issue to other gamers. I would hope so.

On another note, the cover system and the shooting mechanics are also absolute garbage. For whatever reason, they decided to make L2 aim and R2 shoot. Anyone who plays a lot of PS3 will tell you this is highly unusual for a shooter on the platform. Also, R1 gets you into cover. Much like RDR, I'm STILL not even sure how to get out of cover. Do I press R1 again? Just pull the stick away from cover? Push "circle?" Aiming is very sluggish again. Combined with the already- mentioned terrible movement system, getting into firefights in this game is your worst nightmare. Try moving quickly from cover to cover and see how that works out. You'll be riddled with bullets from a Tommy gun before you can say, "The controls in this game suck golf balls through a garden hose."

-The vaseline filter. This one is pretty minor, but it bugged me nonetheless. You'll often see flashbacks of Cole and his platoon in the Pacific and it looks like they smeared vaseline all over the camera. I get that it's a flashback, but couldn't they just use a grey filter or something?

-The "Law and Order" effect. By that I simply mean that we spend a lot of time with our main character, but we know almost nothing about him. We know he was in the war and has a wife and a kid (maybe 2? See, I don't even know) and that he is very dutiful. I'm calling this the "Law and Order" effect because I feel like that TV show, much like this game, is well-written and pretty engaging for the most part, but we know very little about the detectives in the show. ALL the focus is just on the cases and one case is not related to another, just like this game. Maybe if anybody watches that show they can correct me, but I think I'm pretty accurate with this.

-Dangling thread. There was one MAJOR plot point left dangling and it really irks me. You do a lot of work to nail a certain criminal, but once you do, it's revealed that he is "related to somebody high up in the government," so the truth has to be kept under wraps. At the time, I thought, "Oh, this is kinda cool. Certainly it's going to tie into some massive conspiracy at a later point in the game." Nope and nope. What a disappointment.

-The story. I guess this is really the biggest fail for me. I thought they did a great job setting everything up. The first half of the game is essentially a warm up, but once you get to the Vice desk, you get cases that involve drug trafficking, real estate fraud, corruption in the government and everything is slowly revealed to be related somehow and I think it all worked really, really well. Then at the end you just end up having to go through a couple of huge firefights (terrible, of course, due to the controls). In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I'll just say that there's a silly "reveal" and much of the work you did in the second half of the game is rendered pretty much useless. It was such a let-down for me. I mean, I know sometimes things don't always work out exactly right, especially in the "Noir" genre. I think this is a huge difference between games and movies, though. If I had seen this as a 2 hour movie, I might have enjoyed it. But I sunk almost 19 hours into this thing and that's the ending they give me? I put a lot of work into this game rather than just "passively" watching a film. I wanted better. I feel like I deserved better. Am I wrong in thinking this?

FINAL THOUGHTS

The motion scan is obviously a cutting-edge new technology that adds more "realism" to the game and I hope it gets implemented into other games more in the future. The cast looked great and sounded great. Driving around 1947 L.A. was pretty cool. However, I find it pretty difficult to even recommend due to the immensely frustrating controls and how the story builds up so nicely only to come crashing down in a heap of ashy mortar and green lumber.