Rarely have I wanted to love a game as much as I wanted to love L.A. Noire. As a fan of detective fiction and growing up with stuff like L.A. Confidential and Grim Fandango, I could not have been more excited for a story-driven detective noir game, with a focus on collecting evidence, interrogating suspects and solving crimes.

But when I first played the game back in 2012ish, I fell out of love with it severely after the homicide desk. Recently I played Mafia 2 and after doing so much crime, it only felt karmically correct to try to solve some crimes, so I went back and finally played and finished L.A. Noire. These are my somewhat scattered thoughts on the game and its problems.

Spoilers ahead!

In short, L.A. Noire is an ambitious mess, with some amazing ideas that aren’t fully developed, some great writing but mostly sloppy and bloated storytelling. While I love elements of the game, I don’t feel they come together into something greater than the sum of the game’s parts.

L.A. Noire is essentially an adventure game in GTA clothing. Sure there is driving and shooting, but these elements are not essential to the game, they’re not great and can be skipped. The meat of the game is in collecting evidence, interrogating suspects and seeing the story play out.

My problems with the game are: the interrogation system makes no sense and often feels random; the protagonist is too much of a blank slate and I can’t really invest in his story; there are too many cases that don’t feel impactful or feel like they’re given enough time; the overall story is sloppy and left me unsatisfied at almost every big turn.

I’ll try to address these as succinctly as I can.

The interrogation system makes no sense
So you interrogate many different people and on each topic you have 3 options, Truth, Doubt and Lie. Said differently, if you believe their answer, doubt it or you think they’re lying and have some form of proof. BUT, during development, these prompts were Coax, Force and Accuse and in the 2017 remaster of the game these changed once again to Good Cop, Bad Cop and Accuse. The problem is that the system doesn’t actually make sense (in my mind). This system at its core is supposed to be about your ability to read and interpret these people’s answers, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. Hell, the whole point of the face-scan tech they pioneered for this game was to capture nuanced performances, in order to give this aspect of gameplay some actual depth. But in practice, this breaks down a lot of the time, for several reasons. First off, the game’s story complexities are sometimes too much for this 3-pronged system, meaning what is the difference between someone omitting the truth or knowing more than they’ve said? None of them are “wrong” but I've often felt that I didn’t agree with what the game considered to be a “doubtful” answer or a “truth”. I guess the original system makes sense in this respect, since the prompts refer to the method by which you try to gauge more information, rather than your evaluation of the “truthfulness” of what a suspect said. “How can I get more information” is a more compelling thing to try to puzzle out rather than “what version of lying does the game consider this to be”. Cole’s responses often don’t help either, since the doubt option sends him flying into accusations that feel way beyond the scope of “doubt”. Playing the game my way of thinking quickly turned to “what the game wants to hear” instead of “do i think this person is lying”. The good cop / bad cop prompts feel less confusing but the questions written and answers given still feel trapped in some weird limbo of lies, truth, half truths, lies of omissions, and I don’t find any of the 3 sets of prompts to alleviate this problem. The game kinda admits defeat in this sense by letting the player “fail-forward”, which is a interesting design choice (especially in games like Pyre), but in this instance it just feels like the designers knowing that taxing the player for failure would expose the interrogation system’s imperfections and lead to frustration from having to redo these segments (if it’s not a cutscene, it can’t be skipped). But I still found the system more frustrating than anything, despite it being a great idea in theory.

Story woes
I’ll try to sum up my issues with the story by referring to the Homicide desk, which is where the game’s shoddy storytelling really feels at its worst (despite the desk overall having some great moments and characters, Cpt. Donelly most of all).

So you have a number of cases of women getting murdered in similar ways (lottaaaa violence against women in this game, which i guess is accurate for the time, still felt a tad strange). You catch 5 guys for, one for each crime, despite it being obviously the work of the same individual from a certain point onwards. This was frustrating since I know I caught the wrong man, but since I got 5 stars and did everything ‘right’, the game moves just moves on and I didn’t feel that the writing acknowledges this in a sufficient manner (until the 4th/5th case). A perfect exemplification of this is how in each case, right at the end you find some VERY incriminating evidence that is very obviously planted, but this is baaarely brought up. Towards the end, after the fifth case, you really start feeling like it’s all farcical, I mean you’ve arrested the wrong person FIVE times despite how obvious the setups were. But I could forgive that if this whole saga stuck the landing, which it didn’t, at all. In the last case you spend time basically chasing clues left by the serial killer that point to specific locations. This wasn’t super exciting for me since I’m not a resident of LA, the hints didn’t register, and the locations are already kinda marked on the map, so not much of a puzzle there. But the killer literally leads you to his hideout (he’s so “arrogant” that he thinks no one can catch him so he’s “taunting” you), but it felt incredibly unsatisfying to find the killer ONLY because he led me to him (instead of by, you know, doing detective work). And when you finally find the guy, you exchange 3 lines (he literally has to remind you who he was since he pops up once during the 2nd case or something) and he has nothing more to say than twirling his mustache and being menacing. He dies in a fire-fight, the case gets swept under the rug because of politics and to add insult to injury, I was at LEAST expecting this to tie in later with some of the bigger conspiracy. NOPE, that’s the entire story, you wrongfully arrest 5 people, like a dumb-ass, then you catch the killer only with his help and no time devoted to who this guy is, why he did it, or any form of resolution. “That’s very noir” you might say, but I felt that no element of this desk redeemed the overall story, since the individual cases also suffered from having to throw red herrings your way without giving away the big plot (which it did anyway).

This applies in some ways to the overall story and big conspiracy that gets revealed in the final act. A lot of what happens is either telegraphed, predictable, feels rushed or unearned, but I’ve ranted enough on this issue. I’ll just mention that I found it kinda ridiculous that you find a film reel that exposes the entire conspiracy in such a convenient manner (the fact that the “candid” footage is shot for multiple angles makes NO sense, especially in a game that strives for some kind of historical accuracy/believability). Extra ridiculous that the character leaves the film there, when it’s a crucial piece of potential evidence.

I also found Phelps to be a… weird protagonist. Very much a blank slate for most of the game, then suddenly he starts to develop a personality in the last act, but he still comes across as wooden and kinda uncanny. This especially stands out when most of the cast is so colorful and expressive. Maybe it’s the acting or the direction, and I get what they’re trying to do in having Phelps be more of a cipher (to make it easier for the player to project?), but it just made him kinda bland and hard to care for.

Another aspect of the game/story I took issue with is the high number of cases and especially the very high number of characters. I would often struggle to remember which case was which or which character did what when because there’s just so many of them and they get so little screen time per character. This is maybe more of a personal preference, but I feel like having fewer cases, with more time dedicated to a tighter cast of characters would’ve benefited the game greatly. The moment to moment story was generally engaging, but whenever I took a step back to think about what was going on, it just felt shallow.

It’s not all bad
I have a lot of issues with the game, big and small, but there’s also a lot to love about the game. It’s kinda amazing to see so many places recreated with such detail and obvious love. The music and overall mood and cinematography is solid and sometimes even great. Something I especially appreciated is how the game seamlessly cuts between action and cutscenes (something most games struggle with). And the big selling point of the game, the faces, are still kiiiinda amazing and creepy. But the limitations are more obvious than ever, like the fact that the body and faces often don’t match in animation quality or how the face visibly switches from a pre-canned animation to a looping “staring suspiciously” animation. The acting overall is a highlight and carries the game’s often sloppy writing so if nothing else, the investment in the face tech paid off in that respect. I even enjoyed some of the token action shootouts and on-foot chases that were visually fun because of the environmental choreography.

There’s also smaller cool ideas in this game, like how they handle the GPS system. You’ve got the minimap with GPS, like in GTA, but to keep it true to the time period you can press a button and your partner gives you directions, a GREAT idea. But not a fully developed idea, since it’s annoying to press a button after each street to hear directions. I would have made it a ‘partner guided’ mode where they tell you anytime you need to make a turn or something. Like many things about the game, it feels like a great idea that needed a better execution.

There’s more to say about this game, like how I was bothered by the fact that the story is told in 3 different timelines (present, newspaper, army flashbacks). But most of all i’m fascinated by L.A. Noire, a game that I’m amazed was made. In many ways, this feels like the world’s most expensive and ambitious FMV game, since the faces are in essence, video mapped onto a 3D model. But the ambition didn’t materialize in a cohesive gameplay experience, and for me at least, the story and characters didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. There’s no one element that I can point to and say “if this was changed, that game would be amazing” and I don’t think another year of development would’ve helped either. Seems like a game where they made too many big decisions too early and were beholden to them to the end. I love everything that L.A. Noire tries to do and to be, it’s just that it doesn’t manage to achieve any of its ambitions with caveat.

I spent 20+ hours with the game on PC, and if I had to rate the game, I’d probably give it a 7, profoundly flawed, but unique and worth playing for certain elements. Worth noting that the PC version is kinda funky (it’s the 2011 version, not remastered), some have big problems running it, but it seems like it was recently updated and at least it works at higher than 30FPS in my experience (but the car physics are weird and hilarious).

L.A. Noire is a detective game made by Rockstar set in the 1940s in Los Angeles. You play as the new detective Cole Phelps in attempting to solve a series of cases with various partners and people involved, from traffic cases to house fires.

The main feature of the game is that all of the facial animations were done with motion capture, to try to accurately display whether a person was telling the truth or not. Basically, it all came down to reading body language, which I'm sometimes not very good at apparently. I found interviews and questioning to be difficult to get through correctly, although I learned throughout the game. The action sequences are a nice change of pace from the investigating and interviewing. I also liked the subtle helpful hints in the music and the environment to help me whenever I was stuck. Also, there was a cool feature to play in a black & white mode, which was really cool, and really immerses you into vintage police work. I also liked how all of the traffic cases, homicide cases, etc. were linked together and not just one-off cases, besides the DLC cases.

The overall story of Cole Phelps and the other characters was mediocre by the time I got to the end of the game. I felt that the ending was fairly anti-climatic, being a manhunt for one dude we met once in a flashback and then.

Overall, I really did enjoy playing as a detective and experiencing 1940s Los Angeles. I loved the detective mechanics and animations, but there wasn't a strong story to go with them. The DLC cases are interesting and provide a neat twist apart from the main cases. Also, jazz music was good.