L.A. Noire is a promising experiment from Rockstar's past that in many ways has still not seen its full potential realized.
The core gameplay of L.A. Noire has you take on the role of rising star cop Cole Phelps as you collect evidence, famously use facial cues to interrogate suspects and engage in boilerplate Rockstar shootouts and car chases. in 1940s Los Angeles.
The investigation aspect still largely holds up as novel to this day and scrounging around crime scenes for clues (although the game does hold your hand slightly by alerting you when you've found everything of note) adds an extra layer of accomplishment when you pull it out to catch a suspect in a lie. The game does tend to litter the areas with an often repeated supply of irrelevant items that can be inspected and while things like matchboxes will be crucial evidence in some cases and meaningless in others, the game doesn't do this quite enough to justify the junk.
Interrogations themselves are the main draw of the game as it allows its focus on performance capture to shine as one-off suspects become memorable characters. The actual mechanics of investigations as a whole are kind of a smoke and mirrors trick as no level of failure really has any material effect on the game's trajectory but the performances make even small mistakes notable experiences and the writing allows for a botched question to still provide some semblance of information.
The remastered version also replaces the classic "Truth, Doubt, Lie" with "Good Cop, Bad Cop and Accuse" and while "Bad Cop" in particular is a more fitting description, these still don't quite go far enough to convey how Cole might respond to a suspect. Dialogue choices can occasionally lead on tangents that wind up frustrating, such as identifying that a suspect is lying about something but having Cole call them out on something tangentially related you might not have evidence for.
The open world is where this system starts to fall apart and actually lags behind more linear and abstract detective worlds like the Ace Attorney series where it could have expanded on them. Some later missions do progress differently depending on what order you choose to tackle tasks in but most cases do not involve the kind of backtracking and cross-examining that make both L.A. Noire's predecessors and successors interesting.
Instead, the open world is largely just a stage for car chases, gunfights and tailing missions both in main story missions and side quests that don't really feel distinct or interesting. I often found it grating for a case to end with Cole tackling or gunning down a suspect, when it was infinitely more tense to have to bring multiple suspects into the interrogation room and decide who to charge.
This is especially heartbreaking because the world is so well constructed that in a late-game car chase I crashed my car into a building only to realize "Hey this is the laundromat from mission 3" and the final homicide mission that has you use clues to travel to specific landmarks. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really require you to treat its fictional L.A. as a lived-in and interconnected place, instead just pushing you along from point A to point B.
Much of this is understandable when considering L.A. Noire's true intention is to tell a linear story, which it fundamentally does well. The rise and fall of Cole Phelps is essentially a mishmash of noir tropes but the game does a good job of elevating secondary characters such as Cole's partners and his former military teammates to make the story worthwhile. Cole himself fits pretty neatly into the standard Rockstar protagonist at the time as he is naive enough to act as an audience stand-in but tortured enough to add emotional weight.
My primary gripes with the story are that we don't really get to see much of Cole's life outside of his police work and the war, which takes away some of the gravity of a late-game twist. Also, the homicide desk is one of the most satisfying sections of the game from a gameplay perspective but ultimately reads like a non sequitur as the story ramps up in the second half.
Looking back, L.A. Noire is nestled in an odd space where it was not quite as innovative as it could have been. It does well to bring aspects of the more visual novel-style detective games to the AAA space but fails to fully connect the dots as much of the open world aspects feel like filler.
The core gameplay of L.A. Noire has you take on the role of rising star cop Cole Phelps as you collect evidence, famously use facial cues to interrogate suspects and engage in boilerplate Rockstar shootouts and car chases. in 1940s Los Angeles.
The investigation aspect still largely holds up as novel to this day and scrounging around crime scenes for clues (although the game does hold your hand slightly by alerting you when you've found everything of note) adds an extra layer of accomplishment when you pull it out to catch a suspect in a lie. The game does tend to litter the areas with an often repeated supply of irrelevant items that can be inspected and while things like matchboxes will be crucial evidence in some cases and meaningless in others, the game doesn't do this quite enough to justify the junk.
Interrogations themselves are the main draw of the game as it allows its focus on performance capture to shine as one-off suspects become memorable characters. The actual mechanics of investigations as a whole are kind of a smoke and mirrors trick as no level of failure really has any material effect on the game's trajectory but the performances make even small mistakes notable experiences and the writing allows for a botched question to still provide some semblance of information.
The remastered version also replaces the classic "Truth, Doubt, Lie" with "Good Cop, Bad Cop and Accuse" and while "Bad Cop" in particular is a more fitting description, these still don't quite go far enough to convey how Cole might respond to a suspect. Dialogue choices can occasionally lead on tangents that wind up frustrating, such as identifying that a suspect is lying about something but having Cole call them out on something tangentially related you might not have evidence for.
The open world is where this system starts to fall apart and actually lags behind more linear and abstract detective worlds like the Ace Attorney series where it could have expanded on them. Some later missions do progress differently depending on what order you choose to tackle tasks in but most cases do not involve the kind of backtracking and cross-examining that make both L.A. Noire's predecessors and successors interesting.
Instead, the open world is largely just a stage for car chases, gunfights and tailing missions both in main story missions and side quests that don't really feel distinct or interesting. I often found it grating for a case to end with Cole tackling or gunning down a suspect, when it was infinitely more tense to have to bring multiple suspects into the interrogation room and decide who to charge.
This is especially heartbreaking because the world is so well constructed that in a late-game car chase I crashed my car into a building only to realize "Hey this is the laundromat from mission 3" and the final homicide mission that has you use clues to travel to specific landmarks. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really require you to treat its fictional L.A. as a lived-in and interconnected place, instead just pushing you along from point A to point B.
Much of this is understandable when considering L.A. Noire's true intention is to tell a linear story, which it fundamentally does well. The rise and fall of Cole Phelps is essentially a mishmash of noir tropes but the game does a good job of elevating secondary characters such as Cole's partners and his former military teammates to make the story worthwhile. Cole himself fits pretty neatly into the standard Rockstar protagonist at the time as he is naive enough to act as an audience stand-in but tortured enough to add emotional weight.
My primary gripes with the story are that we don't really get to see much of Cole's life outside of his police work and the war, which takes away some of the gravity of a late-game twist. Also, the homicide desk is one of the most satisfying sections of the game from a gameplay perspective but ultimately reads like a non sequitur as the story ramps up in the second half.
Looking back, L.A. Noire is nestled in an odd space where it was not quite as innovative as it could have been. It does well to bring aspects of the more visual novel-style detective games to the AAA space but fails to fully connect the dots as much of the open world aspects feel like filler.