L.A. Noire : PS3
WARNING: This post contains plot spoilers and a generally negative tone. If you don’t like either of these things, then stay away!
So, L.A. Noire, one of the most anticipated and hyped games of the year. I was eager to get this as something a little different and I found myself being passed a copy because its original owner didn’t like it. ‘Didn’t like it?’ I thought to myself, ‘how can this be?’. Well, it really can be.
For those who aren’t in the know, L.A. Noire is a detective game set in mid 1940s Los Angeles. It follows the whole film noir thing, and is dedicated to its atmosphere and setting. First off the bat, it does this very well indeed. Even before the game has started, the titles impress, with the rather cool menu displayed as shadows on a wall and the moody music kicking in as soon as the game is loaded. You enter the game in a thrill of anticipation and relax and let the mood roll over you, drinking in a heady wine-like ambiance. You witness cutscenes which set the story in motion and place you as Cole Phelps, a reasonably likeable character who has returned from a tour in WWII to become a policeman.
The game follows Cole’s career from uniformed officer through a stint in traffic, promoted to homicide, sucked into the vice squad and then, rather oddly until you see how the story plays out, to arson. You play Cole as he goes from crime scene to victim’s home, hunting out clues and questioning suspects until he gets the crime solved and the case is ticked off. Each of the twenty-one cases follows a similar pattern with a cutscene showing you, the viewer, the crime, followed by the detection and then an end of case report.
So let’s run through the good stuff. The atmosphere as mentioned above is well done indeed, and the facial capture of every character you meet and interact with is cannily good with actors you recognise looking pretty much as they do in regular TV. It is this almost unbelievable brilliance which impresses the most, and though occasionally the synching between dialogue and facial movements drops, for the most part it is a near-flawless execution. At one point you get to meet Greg Grunberg and you stare at the screen stunned at how accurate his face is. There we go, that’s the good stuff.
In order to explain just how bad the bad stuff is, I’m going to have to try to go through it as I encountered it, so we’ll start with the driving.
The driving is awful. Not just bad, not just difficult, but truly gamebreakingly awful. You get into a car with the manoeuvrability of a dustbin and you try to squeeze it around streets filled with other dustbins without crashing into any of car, pedestrian or lamppost. Now, it must be noted that I’m English, not American, and driving on the wrong (right) side of the road just didn’t do it for me. There are crossroads with no traffic signals and no clue of how they should (legally) be navigated, there are people who seem to just stop in the middle of the road and get in your way, and at the centre of it all, no matter which one you are driving, is this unresponsive bitch of a car that seems to have no real breaking system. The damage you do to the outside world knocks points off your end of case report, so those cars you total on the way prevent you from getting a five star rating even if you do all the detective stuff perfectly. It is frustrating and it is boring. Later on in the game I encountered some drives (admittedly to get to side missions) that were across the other side of the map. Trying to drive this myself (I’ll get on to how you can avoid all this in a minute) and being careful and trying to be the good driver took me over forty minutes. FORTY MINUTES. For what? Nothing, a boring side mission and the drive back and a ton of accidental damage no matter what I tried to do which meant I was losing points at the end.
Of course, there is another thing… Rockstar have made it so you can skip the driving altogether - you can just tell your partner to drive and it teleports you to the end location. This does mean you miss any side missions on the way, but well, it’s better than the frustration of driving. All this tells me is that Rockstar themselves knew their driving sections were crap, so they gave you an avenue out. Here’s my tip #1 for them:
Tip #1: If you know the driving parts of your game are awful, fix it, don’t just add a ‘skip the driving’ button.
Let’s move past the driving, God knows, I tried to.
So then there’s the other side stuff - running after people and shooting at them, punching people, chasing cars down alleyways (which is like the normal driving section only twenty times more annoying as this time you have to keep up with someone)… These ‘action sequences’ as they seem to be referred to, are like playing cut down versions of other, better, games. L.A. Noire tries to be a third person shooter (which it isn’t) and ends up being a very bad third person shooter with the buttons badly mapped and a cover system that would have been better off in the bin than in the game, it has a touch at being a boxing game only that’s so bad it almost feels tainted to mention it - let’s just say that hammering X a lot beats up all the best baddies, even the seasoned pros without any damage to you, and it tries to be a bit of a car game and Oh God, let’s not go there. Here Rockstar have decided to help out the struggling player by making it so you can skip any of the action sequences if you fail it three times in a row (you can turn off this option, but still…). I need another tip:
Tip #2: If a part of your game is so bad you know people are going to want to skip it then fix that part of your game or remove it. Don’t leave it there to annoy and frustrate people.
How about the meat of this game? What about the detective work? Well here’s the biggest problem with the game: it doesn’t matter. No matter how good or bad you are, no matter which questions you get right or wrong, no matter what clues you get or miss, L.A. Noire is so determined that you continue, that you get to the end anyway. Sure, getting the odd thing wrong means you might end up with an extra action sequence (which you can skip, remember) and ultimately you will have less stars in your rating (why would you care, really?) but you always get to the end of the mission. This is a game that doesn’t reward skill, in fact it begins to feel insulting if you even have any. The ‘homicide’ part of the game is a five mission long story arc about a serial killer (even though your colleagues like to try to believe it’s not) and from very early on any sharp-eyed player knows who the murderer is and yet you have to plod on, putting the wrong people in jail and ignoring the real clues. It is so frustrating I almost took the disc and hurled it out of the window. Playing for hours when you know that the guy you are putting behind bars didn’t do it is not what this game should be about.
It gets worse. The game develops a little and gives you some riddles to work out. ‘Aha!’ I said to myself, ‘now I will get to actually play’. The clues all led to somewhere on the map and the first four I did effortlessly. The fifth however gave me a problem in that I hadn’t ever seen the place it was wanting me to go and I thought ‘oh my, I’m going to have to scour the whole map looking for this place’. I envisioned hours of driving around. Now, despite my hatred of the driving, and despite the idea of wasting hours of gameplay normally being frustrated, I actually relished this because for the very first time, this detective game was making me think and detect. Imagine my disappointment then when after a few minutes of driving around, Cole decides to voice over saying ‘I’ve worked it out, we have to go here’ and a flag appearing on the map in order to help me out! IT TOLD ME THE ANSWER!!! I wanted to do a little detecting in this game just for once, after hours and hours of play and it told me the answer. What’s the point of even trying?
In short, the detection side of the game is a skill-less waste of time and what you do has no real impact on the game. If Bioware had made this game it would have been amazing; you’d put the wrong people in jail, you’d get demoted when they realised you were a crap detective, you’d actually impact the game world. No so here. Rockstar: zero points. So here’s a tip:
Tip #3: If you are going to make a game about being a detective, allow the player to do some detective work.
Finally, I’ll talk a little about the story. It’s the story that makes most games; InFamous would be nothing without its story, Mass Effect would have no drive and a Final Fantasy game would become a few dice throws. L.A. Noire has positioned itself on the market as a great story driven game. Well, failure again. I completed it this afternoon, burning through the last few missions because I wanted to get to the twist. Yup, I expected a twist, because it couldn’t be just as simple as it all looked. And do you know what happened? Do I really need to type it? That’s right. No twist. Nothing. The end of the game story was as pointless as the 20+ hours it had taken me to get there. You know what, I’m going to spoiler it for everyone reading now, the end of the game is…
…
… hold your hats …
…
… that the police and other law enforcement types in L.A. in the forties were corrupt.
Yup, that’s it. They’re corrupt. They’re bad people. They are not nice guys.
Umm, Rockstar, we knew that going into the game, that’s the setting. We’ve known that since we were little. To reveal at the end that the people in charge of the city are the ones behind all the crime is like revealing in The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader is the bad guy. We knew it walking in! A tip:
Tip #4: If you are going to make a story based game, make the story worth telling.
Ultimately it was the story which meant I played through 20+ hours of L.A. Noire. I wanted to give up so many times along the way, but I refused to, telling myself there was more, that I was missing it in some way, that I was the one at fault. After all, how can this game be scoring such high reviews across the board and have so many people excited if it really is this awful? Well, I saw it all, from the first cutscene to the disappointing ending and all I can say is that if you have read this and were wondering whether to buy this game, don’t. There’s so much out there more worthy of your money.
