Developer/Publisher: Team Bondi/Rockstar Games Released: May 2011

Played on: PS3 (also available on 360 & PC)

You’re a cop solving crimes in five different departments in a visually arresting open-world recreation of 1947 Los Angeles. This sounds awesome, and was a highly regarded game upon release, but playing this game 2 years after everyone else, I did not share the same overly positive sentiments. LA Noire is a mixed bag, at its best it’s thrilling, at its worst it drags along infuriatingly.

The bulk of the game’s media attention was centred around its revolutionary facial capture technology, using 32 cameras to capture an actor’s performance and transposing that onto a video game character’s face. This tech shows in the game, the captured faces are more expressive and nuanced than most other video games, but that attempt to emulate a human face more closely seems to have created a greater uncanny valley, there is something unnatural about it all that is hard to put your finger on. There is something ultimately creepy about the facial animation.

This level of facial fidelity is central to one of the game’s main mechanisms, the interrogation. As Officer Phelps you interrogate witnesses and suspects either at the police station or in their place of work/residence. They make a statement, and you respond either Truth, Lie or Doubt depending on what you think their face or statement is indicating. This is a nice idea, but leads to some necessary over-acting to make things more obvious for the player. (The game is plagued by some uninspired performances.) The mechanic is also often broken, it being hard to determine the difference between a lie and a doubt, and sometimes not knowing if you’ve said that correct thing, or even arrested the right person. There are a few examples of times where you investigate a location and have more information than Phelps lets on in his interrogations – it becomes frustrating.

LA Noire is at its best as a procedural detective game, as the player collects clues and tries to solve murders. This is something many games have done over the years successfully through slightly more linear means, and LA Noire is best played when following its linear main story. So this begs the question, why make this an open world game? The developers did an outstanding job capturing 1947 LA, and it would be a treat to drive around if the driving mechanics were good, but they are sloppy and unappealing. The open-world feels completely extraneous to the main game and when I did go off on a tangent it was never a rewarding experience. I ended up treating the game like a linear adventure game and allowed my partner to drive at every opportunity possible.

The procedural elements are indeed a lot of fun, collecting clues, interrogating witnesses and suspects, all that is fun to play out. Phelps’ notebook is an excellent tool the game gives you to refer to the evidence and testimony and help you come to a conclusion as to whodunnit. Some weird logic leaps and gaps are annoying, and is where time and effort should have been spent, rather than building an open-world.

The game really picks up in its last quarter, it becomes a thrilling nailbiter of a detective yarn that is a delight to play through. But the game takes so long to get there! Before that we have to endure hours of tedium and inconsistent writing. I considered giving up on multiple occasions, but am glad I saw it through to experience the ending chapters. This game needed a serious edit and some re-writes, at its core there is a lot to appreciate and enjoy, but as a whole it falls over itself.

Verdict: LA Noire is a fascinating, highly flawed game. Worthwhile as an experiment in animation techniques and detective mechanics, let down by inconsistent writing, poor prolonged structure and an unnecessary open-world.

Should Bradley play this: No, give this one a miss.