LA Noire

I am not a huge Rockstar fan, I find many of their games pedantic and pandering, however I have to admit they give everything they've got in every game. LA Noire may not be the best game I ever played, but I am a fan of the effort, and it is a good game.

I would say the best part of this game is the story that is unravelled one thread at a time through several different means. You play Cole Phelps, a war "hero" trying to apply his sense of ethics into post war 1940's Los Angeles. To say much more would give away a great deal of the story that you should find out for yourself by playing the game, but I will say Cole is a unique anti-hero, a very flawed character trying to do right as he see's it.

Pictured: Not Cole Phelps

The game mechanics are nothing short of amazing. Interrogation programming utilized motion capture that allows you to actually recognize actors and delivers tiny cues for those tricky interrogations. The shooting and driving works as good as any Rockstar game, and the map is modelled on actual city of Los Angeles street plans from that era, great looking, well detailed, and huge; in a game like this, where you literally spend half the game examining the scenery and travelling, this is a key point, and it was done very well.

Unfortunately the problems are as glaring as the positives. The game pacing suffers; going from intense interrogations to flat out gang warfare in the blink of an eye is jarring (I'm assuming at some point the project managers said "Hey, we're Rockstar, when do we stop thinking and start shooting and stealing?") Also, I hated the character of Cole Phelps; he's well written and likely came off exactly as intended, but I have rarely felt that much loathing for an individual (may not make much difference to anyone else, but it's important to me). One last thing, the game requires a fair bit of work to play effectively, I found myself keeping extensive notes to keep track of clues and suspects, maybe not everyone's idea of a good time.

I like this game, but I don't know that I really enjoyed it, it was a bit more work than I'm used to in my leisure time. As such, I'm very torn about how to rate it but I'm going 8/10 with a sale caveat: if you get it on sale, which it often is, it's well worth it, but this is not a full price game