A cross between everything from Heavy Rain to even Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, is Rockstar Game’s L.A. Noire a revolution for the adventure genre?
By Leo Stiles
If you boot up L.A. Noire with the expectation of playing a 1940s-themed Grand Theft Auto then you are in for a shock.
Rockstar’s latest game does almost everything worse than their premier crime series, with shootouts, driving thrills and open world exploration all pale imitations of anything you will find in Liberty City.
Yet a couple of hours in and all these comparisons evaporate as the game emerges as a hard boiled adventure that not only is a great experience in of itself but also one of the most mature video games ever made.
Before we get to the why, let’s dig into the more familiar elements of the game, which is set just after the second world war in a Los Angeles that is about to become the driving force of America’s economic and cultural dominance.
You play Cole Phelps, a rookie cop with the LAPD who is one of the true blue evangelists of the rule of law and the game follows his meteoric rise through the police ranks as he deals with, vice, corruption, murder and his own personal demons.
Mad Men fans will recognise plenty of the game’s actors, including Aaron Staton as Cole Phelps
1940’s Los Angeles is rendered with a level of detail that is to be expected from the house of GTA and the game boasts that the map is over 90% accurate in its depiction of the city.
The world certainly looks solid enough and the excellent audio design helps to sell a thriving metropolis, but spend enough time in its environs and the curiously empty nature of its street becomes apparent and almost distracting to the point that it feels like a film set rather than anything organic.
As you might expect from a Rockstar game there is plenty of driving to and from missions or cases as this game has it and the cars have that same exaggerated handling from GTA4 that made that game such a joy to play.
But all this is in service of very little actual gameplay out in the sandbox and while there are a few random missions to get to grips with and some collectables cars and other goodies, L.A. Noire could jettison much of this without hurting the game in almost any way.
To any seasoned gamer, this would sound like a disaster in the making but developer Team Bondi has pulled off something that marks itself as a genuine departure for the company and the result is a deeply layered story that ignores cheap thrills for something more fulfilling.
The case-style structure of the game is what sets the L.A. Noire apart, with each promotion ushering in a series of cases delivered by your division captain. Along with these promotions comes a different partner and regular collaborators that keep the story fresh and also add different dynamics to the “police work.”
It’s here that the game really starts to shine, with each case starting with a crime scene which you have to scour for clues before interviewing witnesses and suspects and building up your own picture as to what really happened.
For the best part of the game this structure doesn’t change and occasionally it does get a bit repetitive. Despite this, each case is utterly fascinating thanks to the game’s incredible facial animation and sterling voice work.
MotionScan magic
This facial animation is essential to the way the game works, with the digital actors expressing and emoting like you’ve never seen in any game before it. That’s technological leap is to be expected when you consider that Team Bondi developed the ‘MotionScan’ tech, yet to see it implemented so perfectly in its first outing is breathtaking.
Gone are the talking mannequins of just about every other game out there and in their place are disturbingly convincing virtual actors that express a whole range of emotions that just trounce the happy/angry varieties of GTA and even Mass Effect.
This massive range of facial expression is more than just eye candy because your assessment of these witnesses and suspects is the key to progressing through the story and while the game is certainly forgiving, your success in cracking a case could lead to innocents living and dying on how you interact with the game characters.
While there is still that jarring sense that things are a bit hyper real, the acting on display is of such a high calibre that you just get sucked into the story and it papers over such hoary old clichés such as the wife who conspires to kill her husband for a life insurance fraud.
Indeed the dialogue is certainly familiar to anyone who likes a bit of pulp fiction but that said there are a number of emotional highs that are quite breathtaking for a videogame.
This case structure is fairly repetitive and has more than a hint of Phoenix Wright about it and there were times when I thought that the game was just riffing on L.A Confidential a little too hard but then something unexpected would happen and I’d be sucked back in again and it has to be said that many of the cases are broken up with chases and stakeouts all manner of diversions. 
Ultimately, any comparisons to GTA are pointless because L.A. Noire is absolutely its own game and if you had to make a comparison then Sony’s interactive movie, Heavy Rain is far more appropriate. But where that game was reliant on hokey coincidences and overwrought and overplayed drama, L.A. Noire is all this with deeper shades of grey, subtlety and maturity that is a landmark in interactive storytelling.
Format: Xbox 360, Playstation 3; Developer: Team Bondi
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