L.A.Noire

As i'm sure most people are aware of L.A.Noire is based in LA (surprise surprise) during the Noir period of the 1940's and 50's where every man wore a suit with a matching fedora and if you didn't you were probably considered poor and not worthy to be remembered during this time.

Anyway i should move on...

In L.A.Noire you play as the baby faced Cole Phelps an aspiring young policeman who has returned home after giving the Japs a good thrasing at Okinawa during World War 2 and now wishes to turn his attention to cleaning the streets of LA......good luck with that.

The game splits itself over 5 different desks such as Patrol, Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson each resembling a different area of the police force and each desk has several different cases to be solved before you move onto the next one. Now seeing as the Patrol desk is pretty much the tutoral for the game this leaves 4 desks for Mr Phelps to have fun with.

Each case starts out with you and your partner investigating the scene of the crime looking for evidence to peice together the mystery and discover what happened. Once you've found the right clues chances our you will then have to interrogate a witness/suspect for further information and in between these there will be various action scences such as shoot outs and car/foot chases.

L.A. Noire prides itself on it's advanced motion capture system that is designed to pick up slight human reflexes which the player has to notice and determine if the person your interogating is telling the truth, not being fully truthful or outright lying to your face. Now this all sounds good in theory but has several flaws...much like communism (which the game likes to joke about every so often as well)

One of these is that you have no idea how Phelps is going to respond once you have decided if you think the witness/suspect is being truthful/ being vague or lying. The best way to stress this point would be imagine a situation where you are unsure if the suspect is withholding information or lying and you accuse them of the former when they really lying, this leads to an intresting situation of Phelps suggesting they know more information regarding something completly different and the suspect literaly telling Phelps to go Fuck himself...... This leads to a lot of problems in the harder cases

Anyway, this is just one of the few problems on what is a great game and experience if you go into it with the right mindset. You are playing as a member of the LAPD and because of this you can't run around waving you gun and causing mayham so those expecting this to be an old fasioned GTA will be and should be disapointed.

Oh yeah and another problem with this game is that the fences are bloody invincible...this is most annoying during a car chase, as in any other sandbox style game a fence would just crumble out of the way of your car only slowing you down briefly whilst in this one the effect is driving straight into a solid wall, meaning that you have to reverse and try and catch up with your fleeing suspect....who has probably gotten away and is laughing his way to Mexico.

Also in some of the cases the game tries to shock you with disturbing images such as naked and mutalied female corpses (mainly on the homicide desk)...this is probably meant to reflect the brutal things these detectives have to see on a regular basis along with the "it's just another day at the job" sort of thing. Oh yeah and L.A.Noire jumps on the peadophillia bandwagon. One of these happens quite early on in the game where your simply investigating a traffic incident and then somehow stumple upon an underage porn industry....WTF!!

Anyway...moving on from peadophilla, the game has stunning visual effects and even has a black and white mode for those wishing to play the game in true Noir style. I of course tried this feature out.....for about 5 minutes and switched back because it really is nothing special and doesn't really add anything to the game.

Also the game kinda does what Dragon Age II does and by that i mean it saves it's main plot story for the last few hours of the game and just keeps you going with mini storys until you reach it and when you do it's nothing amazing and i found myself playing it...just to get it done and out of the way.

I'm getting tired and want to go to bed now so heres a final summary....dispite the negative things i've said about L.A.Noire above it is truly a great game and one that is worth playing if a bit repetitve at times as each case follows a similar pattern, but else do you except as all your doing is playing the role of a detective as he goes about his day job, the main flaws of the game are nothing but minor inconviences that you quickly get over with as you go into each case curious as to what it's about and whats happened. The "shocking" images are really nothing compared to other stuff thats around these days anyway (Who hasn't scene a mutalated corpse nowdays)

In short...this is a game worth playing, so if you don't wish to buy it...rent it and then rent it again...as you wouldn't of finished it in time