| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PlayStation 3 | 8.00 |
| Overall | 8.00 |
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LA Noire is one of the most unique games I have played this generation. The framework of the game includes standard open world game cliches we all know but at the core it's an interrogation game where reading faces is the hook. This is one of those games where my list for negatives is far larger than the list of positives yet I could not put the game down. The setting and premise was so different that it overcame it's limited gameplay to an extent. Lets start with the bad first, its an open world game with almost nothing to do. Team Bondi recreated 1940s LA not to explore but to make you feel like you are part of this world. There are a few side missions to do, the main ones involving answering emergency calls which lead to a simple mission where you either shoot or chase someone. There is also collection cars (hard to do when all cars look the same), finding landmarks, and locating hidden film reels (impossible to find without a guide). This just feels like filler to pad the game so that they can say its not just level after level even though that is what it is. During your cases you will get into car chases, on foot chases and have shootouts. I can name you a bunch of games that do all these things better than LA Noire. The gunplay is as basic as it gets and by now you know the drill, take cover, pop out and shoot at the right time. There is no challenge to this, no levels where the gunplay is interesting, its just there cause gamers need to shoot stuff or they go crazy I guess. The car chases at least have this Hollywood action movie feel to them which makes them interesting. They are all very scripted which leads you to drive through all sorts of props along the way. Oh and there is some fist fighting but again super basic with no real depth. What LA Noire tries to do is make you feel like a detective so the meat of the game is in its investigation areas and interrogation. The investigation aspect is where I feel they failed the most as it boils down to the player just walking all over an area pressing the search button. There is no real investigating at all, half the time you cant even see what you are supposed to be finding so the only way to be thorough is to walk everywhere. Detective Phelps will be picking up all sorts of crap as you do this like empty bottles, but the game will always let you know when something is important or not. There is zero thinking involved, never do you have to put clues together to find something nor do you ever need to make a judgement call if something is important or not. The game does all of it for you. Imagine an adventure game where all you do is collect objects from the world but never use them, that is what this is like. The saving grace of LA Noire is its interrogations which have their own share of problems as well but you have never done anything quite like it. During these moments it is up to you to read faces, to know the evidence and try to figure out if the suspect is lying or telling the truth. The facial animation system developed for this game is nothing short of revolutionary and it puts all other digital acting in games to shame. You see every nuance of the face, it's true digital acting. These are real actors delivering real performances. The execution of these segments is lacking as all you really do is choose from three choices, truth, doubt and lie. Doubt and lie are similar to each other, the difference being that lie means you have a hard piece of evidence to prove they are lying, doubt just means you think they are telling you a lie or with holding info. Problems arise when you have to decide between doubt and lie because you must always adhere to what the game wants you to pick. For some strange reason during many interrogations an answer you think fits the situation does not, for instance moments where evidence you have will clearly contradict the lie but you are not supposed to use the evidence on that suspect but on another one, therefore if you choose lie you are incorrect. What happens is that you end up thinking more about what the game wants you to choose rather than what you would logically choose. That kind of creates a fundamental flaw that totally ruins the entire interrogation experience and yet I didn't really care. For whatever reason choosing from three simple answers was as intense and nerve-racking as any experience in gaming. I have thrown my controller in frustration from dying in a hard portion of game many times but I have never thrown my controller cause I choose an incorrect answer before, now I have. When an interrogation goes smoothly and you get all answers correct I feel so badass, I am literally fist pumping my correct answers. But when it goes bad, oh man I was so pissed. If you screw up enough the entire case goes to hell and you sometimes charge the wrong suspect; during these moments I felt horrible. I felt like I lost the game yet the story keeps on going even as a screw up. I was emotionally invested in this game even though the gameplay never hooked me and for that I can't give it a bad score. The game is lengthy, you easily have nearly 20 hours of game here. The overall story starts to get interesting toward the end but then goes a bit over the deep end, don't expect a grand story like Red Dead. Once you finish the game you will probably want to replay all the missions again to either do them correctly or screw them up on purpose to see how they change. I think players who look at games from just a mechanical level will hate the game. If you let yourself get involved in the story and take the interrogations seriously I believe you will enjoy this very different gaming experience. |
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Posted by Dvader Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:08:22
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