L.A. Noire Review

Midway through L.A. Noire did I finally realize that I wasn’t having much fun.

It wasn’t that the game wasn’t a well realized period piece, with the right mind to focus the details on clothing, music, and what it would feel like walking down the streets to get a feel for the daily grind of the average citizen. What the game did well is capture people. The way they carried themselves when they walked. The way they gave you bad looks when you nearly hit them chasing after a bad guy. The interiors of the game look tremendous. It’s quite remarkable just how much detail went into designing the dirty dishes in the sink, the dirty laundry on the floor in a bedroom’s closet. A magazine teeters on the edge of a big over-sized chair, the binding of the pages folded back. The light that filtered through the horizontal blinds, casting a blinding white haze into the dining room, illuminating dust hanging in the air. A neighbor’s radio playing in the backyard.

These are the details that Team Bondi have taken into consideration to craft a game that knows it’s different. The risks are there, and are as obvious as ever: it’s your turn to ask the questions. And if you ever thought for one second that your knowledgeable in transcribing a lie or truth because you watched Law and Order: you’ll do quite poorly in this game.

You play as Cole Phelps, an ass kisser who quickly climbs the ranks as a police officer at the LAPD, he has a generally knack for puzzle solving, and finds that righting the wrongs of the world aides in his sleep at night. As a stern officer of the law, he is naturally without a sense of humor. He believes the world is a rather cruel place where people kill others for no reason other than for a chuckle or two, and that it is his responsibility to make sense of it.

When I was playing L.A. Noire, things felt off. Cole wasn’t just an ass kisser, a goody two-shoes who wants to put his best efforts into solving the case correctly and efficiently, he’s selfish. The partner he gets assigned is the typical lazy cop. The one who wants to wrap things up, the kind that wants to blame the death of a woman on the husband who’s stressed over work. The partner changes as Cole gets promoted to a higher ranking, but the partner and his feelings towards the grind of working a case stay the same. Pretty soon, you realize that Cole isn’t selfish, but annoyed at the whole justice system. People want the easy way out. “Pin this on her, you catch him doing that, and we are done before lunchtime” an older, considerably larger partner says to Cole while driving. Cole has an “Asshole Complex” but instead of blaming his temper on the world, it’s actually towards the apathy of the police department he’s working for.

The game brags about it’s “revolutionary” facial expression technology, and there is no shame in declaring said technology as “revolutionary”. The expressions are good, not great. Every nuance in the face is shown as a possible indicator of a lie, or deceit. It’s a way a character can show that their remorseful, or shameful, that they are embarrassed or annoyed. It’s all there for you to examine.

Unfortunately, I wish they spent their resources elsewhere, because though the technology is there to make you feel like the person you’re interrogating has real emotions, the actual face of the character is rather average looking. Something as simple as hair should at least fake the 3d effect, but Cole’s hair is suctioned cupped to his head, wrapped around in a way that the obvious seams of the texture meet with the mesh of his head are shown, giving the “Max Payne” like appearance of taught skin over bone.

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