Remember when those absolute idiots who probably think the height of comedy is a fart, called Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Horse? Because a game company can only makes one type of game if that game is the only popular one, even though I remember Rockstar releasing a racing game and a puzzle game. It is a stupid assumption, like saying Valve only make First-Person Shooters. But people won’t really be able to “cleverly” nickname L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Noir, because it is a different kettle of fish, while their may be driving in a large, open world, L.A. Noire is more reminiscent of classic Adventure games, with a mixture of Open-World games and a dash of Third-Person Shooters.
The game is set in Los Angeles in 1947 and our protagonist du jour is Cole Phelps; a go-getting Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) rookie, former Marine and Silver Star recipient who wants to show his initiative in investigations in order to rise through the ranks in the force. As you progress, you play through five departments, or ‘desks’, of the LAPD; first is ‘Patrol’, where all newcomers must start and you’re a beat cop, proudly wearing the uniform of the LAPD because the Rampart scandal, the Rodney King incident and stripper cops haven’t happened yet. It’s mostly just a tutorial to get you accustomed with the controls and concepts; then you’re put into ‘Traffic’, investigating all vehicular related crimes; then the fun desk of ‘Homicide’, investigate the gruesome crimes of the city; then ‘Vice’, where you trying to teach the citizens to just say “no” and investigate drug smuggling; and finally, you are put into the ‘Arson’ desk to investigate suspicious fires.
Each desk has a varied number of missions, or ‘cases’, and while the cases in the Patrol and Traffic desk are individual and not connected to each other, the other desks each have an overarching connection; in Homicide, each murder victim is killed in a similar modus operandi and may have been killed by the guy who killed Elizabeth Short, AKA The Black Dahlia, a famous murder mystery from the ‘40s; Vice is searching and investigating the spread of army surplus morphine which was stolen from a supply ship; while Arson cases seem to have some connection to a Elysian Fields Developments, a Los Angeles based property developer who is a benefactor of the Suburban Redevelopment Fund, a semi-government fund that is building homes for returning GI’s, which has prominent members of LA society like the District Attorney, the Chief of Police and the mayor funding it.
In each one of the desks, Cole will be partnered with another detective of the same desk; in Patrol, there’s Ralph Dunn, a listless patrolman who prefers to let the detectives do the detecting work; In Traffic, you have Stefan Bekowsky, a sardonic Polish-American who is the forceful big mouth to Cole’s quiet demeanour who resents Cole at first meeting for getting into Traffic so quickly but quickly attaches to him; Finbarr “Rusty” Galloway aides you in Homicide, a slightly misogynistic sceptic who has no qualms drinking during a case; the sexist, racist and possibly corrupt detective, Roy Earle, helps you in Vice, who has a more veteran understanding of the criminal world and believes in letting things slide for bigger busts; and finally there is Herschel Biggs of the Arson desk, a loner veteran of World War I who served as the narrator at the start, then disappears at the end of the Patrol desks, who dislikes Cole initially for his pomposity, but grows to like him and his belief in not allowing the higher-ups to scare him.
As the title partly suggests, L.A. Noire is dripping with Film Noir so much, it should come with a free fedora, a pack of smokes and a dame who’s trouble from the moment you saw her. Which is good for me, because I have always been a fan of the Film Noir genre and its subgenres; I like the music, the dialogue, the characters and the atmosphere, and all that awesome stuff is brimming to the top in L.A. Noire. The characters of L.A. Noire are perfect archetypes of the Noir genre in that they start as simple paper cut-out characters with a “black-and-white” morality, but as the story progresses they start to gain depth and complexities, especially with our protagonist as, overtime, we get flashbacks to his time in the military; from officer training to the harsh battles of the Pacific war, and get some inkling to his motivations in joining the police and his ambitious drive.
And it would be very fucking stupid of me not to give considerable dedication to the game's soundtrack, since one of the defining qualities of Film Noir were their amazing soundtracks. L.A. Noire's soundtrack is a perfect mixture of orchestra and jazz; giving you that feeling, that I've been constantly forcing down your throats, of a hard-boiled detective trying to make the world right. At times, the soundtrack can be filled with mystery and intrigue as you try to find the right clues and prove someones's deception, then it can be a smooth jazz solo as you cruise through the streets of LA, then it can be a thumping orchestral score as you chase someone over rooftops and alleyways. There's also a single in-game radio that plays classics from the '40s and even has real radio programmes from the day that you can listen to.
The game also offers the opportunity to play the entirety of the game in black-and-white, and it is very stylistic. I highly recommend you play through the entirety of the game at least once in this mode; it real helps to set the mood as a ‘40s detective. You might wonder why this just wasn’t something that the game should be like from the get-go, if the developers wanted to create a noir feel? Well, it is because there are massive dickheads in this world who think that when something is in black-and-white, not for technical reasons but to make some statement, they will view it as “artsy-fartsy” and “pretentious” and seriously marking it down, even if it is beneficial.
The majority of the game follows a formula that may cause the game to become slightly repetitive if you play the game in one whole go. You start of at one of the police stations and get a briefing, then go to the crime scene and investigate, and this is where the game has some Adventure game influences, that instead of pointing-and-clicking, you move about finding clues. When you enter a crime scene, a snatch of mystery-filled music plays that will stop once you’ve discovered all clues, which you find by wandering around looking and searching objects, with interact objects shown through a “ding” sound and your controller rumbling. Then you interact with the clue, which is added to your notebook, and you use the analogue stick to rotate the clue, with some rotating being necessary in order to focus on a certain part of the clue.
Then you visit persons of interest and question them. This is were the game’s much touted Motion Scan technology becomes part of gameplay; when you’ve add someone a question, you have to judge whether their telling the truth or lying, or doubt them if you think they’re lying but have no proof, based on their facial expressions and if you accuse them of lying, you have to present the clues you found as evidence to prove they are lying. Now, this concept worried me slightly, because a person acting like their lying can be very obvious and unsubtle, but thankfully, my worries are quashed as the acting (and the voice acting) is great and some facial tics can be very deceiving. But, there’s a bit of a rare problem in interrogations in which you will ask a person a question, they will answer and you can’t really prove they are lying to that particular question, however, if you do press “lie” then Cole will ask a different, sometimes irrelevant question and that is the one you have to prove they are lying. If you get stumped, then the game offers "intuition points". A sort of hint system, were you get one point each time you go up an experience level (Maximum level being 20), and you get experience points for every question you get right. You can use an intuition point to either remove one of the three replys and make your own judgement from then on, or "ask the community" if you're currently signed into whatever game network, were upon a percentage will be next to a reply showing what other players chose. I used it them quite a bit and always felt disappointed for using them and that's the kind of mindset L.A. Noire puts you in; you want to get everything right and without any assistance.
There are some action sequences in each case like gun fights and chases, and some might say that seems a bit out of place in a game emulating Adventure games, you don’t really have fight sequences in The Secret of Monkey Island with combos and all that, but they add a nice layer of variety and juxtaposition; keeping both the quiet, cerebral investigations and the loud, fast action scenes fresh.
If I dared stating that L.A. Noire has an open-world environment, I might go to purgatory for possibly lying. L.A. Noire’s world is an open world in theory, in that while you can drive around the huge eight square foot recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, commandeering vehicles, that’s pretty much it; you can’t go into any buildings except those that were featured in cases or are landmarks; there are no distracting mini-games, but there are side missions called “street crimes”, that just appear randomly appear and are less investigatory and more action oriented, with car chases, foot chases and gunfights. There are collectibles to find around the map, but those are just for completionist freaks or trophy whores like me.
The Motion Scan technology the game implements is amazing and is a great stepping stone in the history of video games, because video games have always been lambasted in their inability to created realistic human faces that also express realistic emotions and actually speak realistically, with many getting dangerously close to the uncanny valley effect. The game that I can think of that came close to realistic human faces and expressions was Half Life 2, but L.A. Noire completely trumps that with completely genuine faces that wrinkle, crease, and bulge, you can even spot the actor they used for the character. And this great technology isn’t just limited to the main characters, it’s used on everyone; characters that appear for five seconds and never seen again, children, even just civilian models that wonder the streets of Los Angeles that you will never really see their face up close or their emotional reactions.
Not only is the facial technology amazing, but also so is the detail put to recreating an authentic 1940s Los Angeles. When you drive around the massive eight square inch map, you will be amazed at the level of detail and variety. I rarely stumbled across two of the same buildings or shops or bars. The interiors of buildings that are either crime scenes or places to visit are also amazing and wonderfully detailed; they actually looked realistic, like someone would actually lived there with personal touches rather than looking like a Sim house lazily put together.
However, there does not seem to be much attention to detail afforded to the bodies of models, specifically clothing and animation. Clothes on models, while not primitive, look inferior in comparison to the details of faces and interiors, they look a little clumpy and like they were just glued onto the character or something to that effect. It creates this weird effect of having an incredibly realistic head on a unrealistic body, like an artist painting a head of immeasurable quality and beauty and the rest of the portrait is just a stick figure.
The biggest disappointment for me, however, is in the ending of the game, specifically the last three cases of the Arson desk (barring any DLC), because it is a textbook sufferer of Xen Syndrome. Look it up. Okay, I would not be the well-respected and revered media critic that I am if I didn’t teach my two readers something. "Xen Syndrome" is a media term coined by TV Tropes used exclusively for video games, usually good video games. It is when the last part of the game differentiates very greatly, in a bad way, from the rest of the game so greatly, that it seems like a different developer designed it. It is named after the ‘Xen’ level in Half Life, which had unbalanced gameplay, annoying jumping puzzles and no scripted NPC events. In L.A. Noire’s case; you play a different but related character, Jack Kelso, a claims investigator for an LA based insurance company and later an investigator for the Assistant District Attorney, who served in the Okinawa Campaign and had run-ins with Cole and was involved in officer training with Cole which he left; during the cases, while you do investigate for clues, you hardly use found clues in the interrogations; the only time you do is in the second one, and did I mention there are only about two interrogations in the whole three cases? In addition, what is worse is that the first interrogation takes place at the very start of the first case, so if they look like their lying, choose “doubt”. Action scenes make up many of these cases, which isn’t good, because in the majority of the game, action scenes were a minority, existing only for variety, and too liven up cases. Another thing great about L.A. Noire that is absent in the last part is your partner, so there is no lovable and developing dialogue and while Jack is an interesting character, it would be nice to have him conversing with a conflicting partner, it just makes the driving boring and silent, but then again you can just skip to the required destination.
The walking gameplay is also a bit fiddly, especially when indoors and Cole will be stuck on chairs and desks and you must fiddle about to get him unstuck. With all the advanced facial technology, Team Bondi couldn’t add a simple animation of Cole shifting past the furniture. It gets especially annoying during the inevitable foot chase scene with the equal inevitable chase up a ladder, because if you miss the ladder by an inch, you’ll slam right into the wall and stop in place and you can’t just side step to get on the ladder; you have to do a complete 180, then do a U-turn to get on the ladder. Nevertheless, just to make it clear, these problems never ruined the game for me and weren’t deal breakers.
L.A. Noire is a shining example that for all the homogeneous space marines with obligatory stealth section and sandboxes of current generation gaming, there is still plenty of imagination and balls within the mainstream video game industry. Sure, there are some flaws and they take up quite a portion of this review, but L.A. Noire is a small, shaky step in the right direction and, hopefully, Team Bondi will do an “Assassin’s Creed manoeuvre” and make a sequel which is a more powerful stride in the right direction and it could be the stuff that dreams are made of.
I’m Random Internet Critic and I criticise because I’m dippin’ in that L.A. noir, I’ve been sleepin’ three days in my car.
No comments:
Post a Comment