LA Noire tells the story of Cole Phelps, war hero and ex-marine who rises through the ranks of the LAPD in post-war (1947) Los Angeles. As expected in a film noir, Phelps is... not exactly a perfect hero. His story is told through a combination of in-engine cinematics and 'flashback' sequences which retell his history during the war. Phelps is played (and I use that term literally - the game's motion capture and digitization are truly revolutionary, so the character in-game is an almost eerie likeness of the actor himself) by Aaron Staton, best known as Ken Cosgrove on AMC's sublime period drama, Mad Men.
As Phelps, the player works his way through the LAPD (cutting his teeth on the Traffic desk first, before moving up to higher-profile desks such as Homicide or Vice) by solving a series of cases. Game play, such as it is, involves mostly moving from one location to another, gathering 'evidence', and questioning suspects (or 'Persons of Interest', in cop-parlance), with just a bit of driving and shooting thrown in for variety (it IS a Rockstar game, after all). The evidence-gathering can be a bit tedious - it plays out like a modern-day adventure game 'pixel-hunt' where you walk around a crime scene, and pick up various and sundry items, turn them over in Cole's hands and wait for him to either notice something important or mention that it's not relevant to the case. Sometimes this can be relatively intuitive (noticing the shoe-size of a given suspect can help you eliminate them from questioning if the size doesn't match bootprints at the murder scene, for instance) and sometimes they can seem illogical and completely unhelpful (you would think that finding a can of flammable gas at an arson suspect's home would be useful, but apparently not).
The real meat of the game (and, indeed, the part that's gotten the game the most press prior to release), is the 'interview' process as you talk to witnesses and suspects and try and discern whether they're telling you the truth or not. By watching the (again, outstanding) motion capture of the character's faces, you can see various facial tics, swallows or blinks which - like poker tells - tend to belie what the individual is telling you. You may then either accept what they're telling you as the truth, 'doubt' it, or outright accuse them of lying (the latter response requires you to have acquired a piece of evidence to prove them as a liar, or else the POI will clam up and be completely unhelpful for the remainder of the interview). Responding correctly will open up new avenues as the character reveals different leads or clues that you would otherwise miss out on if you answer poorly. This is harder than it looks as some characters (a seedy land developer played by Fringe's own Walter Bishop, John Noble, comes immediately to mind) are downright tough to read, with the only hitch to give anything away being the slight flutter of the carotid artery to indicate a slightly-elevated heart rate (yes, the motion capture is THAT good). This is great stuff, in theory, but the main problem here is that there's no punishment for being absolutely horrid at interviewing - seriously, you can blow every question and then the game will create some deus ex machina (either Phelp's partner making a comment, an especially-helpful phone call or even stumbling across the suspect completely by accident) that will fill you in on just where you need to go next. Sure, it keeps the plot moving forward, but it comes across as hollow. The only real impetus for you to try to answer all the questions correctly is the end-of-case 'score' that the game gives you based on your performance (and the achievement points that come with them).
Essentially, most cases boil down like this - proceed to location A, find all the clues, talk to all the people, then proceed to location B, repeat, head to location C, find suspect, chase suspect (because they ALWAYS run - either in a vehicle or on-foot), arrest suspect, then try to get a confession in the interview room. If you fail to get a confession, though, don't worry, because something else will inevitably come up which will ensure that the 'guilty' party either ends up on a slab or in the hoosegow. I personally found this frustrating because it makes what they advertise as a truly open-world detective game feel almost oppressively linear. You can't arrest or shoot the wrong suspect because the story won't let you. I'm all for narrative continuity, but a little leeway would have been nice, is all I'm saying.
Thankfully, for a game that banks so heavily on its story, at least it's a good one. At the risk of spoiling anything, I'll just say that LA Noire takes a page out of classic noir films (you can even choose to play the game in black-and-white - a real nice touch, imho) complete with femme fatales, crooked cops and plot twists galore. Even as the gameplay gets monotonous (and it *can* get monotonous, believe me - by the time you've driven to your thirtieth dilapidated hotel and dug around in a suspect's trash looking for a gum-wrapper with an address written on it, your mind may start to wander) the story will keep you interested in pressing through to the next case.
Now this is not meant to sound negative - sure, the gameplay can seem a bit blase at times, but when the game's mechanics work in the manner the developers intended, it's a truly unique and exciting gaming experience. There's one case on the homicide desk where you have two legitimate suspects - you have evidence which points to both of them and you honestly cannot tell which one did the deed. So you haul them both into the station and then go back and forth between the interview rooms essentially playing them off each other. If you play your cards right, you get one to implicate the other and voila, you have your perp dead to rights. Unfortunately for Rockstar, there just isn't enough of these moments.
Still, taken as representative of where the adventure game genre (because it IS, at its heart, an adventure game, even though it's got driving and shooting - don't let anyone tell you otherwise) is headed, it has me genuinely excited for the future. LA Noire's tremendous story and revolutionary digital 'actors' makes it a very worthwhile play-through and I'm hopeful that Team Bondi gets the chance to make a proper sequel (maybe a little less linear, with a little more rope to hang yourself with) which could be absolutely gangbusters. Pardon the pun.
Geek Score: 8 out of 10 bacon stripsWhat I'm Playing: Infamous for PS3 (Have to finish it before I dive into the sequel)
What I'm Reading: Batman & Son
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