It has neither the street-level realism of “Grand Theft Auto IV” or the sense of place of “Mafia II,” but “L.A. Noire” does something no open-world game has been able to before it: deliver missions that are actually fun. This may not sound like much, but poll any “Grand Theft Auto” fan, and he’ll tell you the vast majority of his time with “GTA” is spent ignoring the missions in favor of just driving around causing mayhem.
“L.A. Noire” is just the opposite. You can’t shoot random people, you can’t sell drugs, and you can’t visit prostitutes. You can’t even run over a fire hydrant without being penalized. It’s annoying at first, but “L.A. Noire” benefits greatly from taking place in a world that doesn’t rob itself of consequence by letting you do whatever you want.
In fact, “L.A. Noire” owes less to “GTA” than it does to the “Ace Attorney” games. That series tasked you with searching crime scenes and questioning witnesses, and using the resulting evidence to contradict lies in courtroom testimony. “L.A. Noire” moves the action to, surprise, midcentury Los Angeles, casting you as a detective working his way up from the traffic desk to the vice squad and beyond. The story tangles you up in corruption, an old World War II buddy, even the Black Dahlia case, but your moment-to-moment time with the game is spent doing good old-fashioned police work.
| ‘L.A. Noire’ |
| » Systems: PS3, Xbox 360 |
| » Price: $59.99 |
| » Rating: 4 out of 5 stars |
This is where the game gets to show off its marquee feature, a motion-capture system that photographs each actor’s face from 32 angles, allowing for easy — and realistic — transition to 3-D graphics. It’s a technique similar to the one used in Robert Zemeckis’ film adapatations of “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf,” and made “L.A. Noire” the first video game shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, but more important than that, it provides a respite from the wooden facial animations that populate most games.
The mocap also helps you determine if witnesses are telling the truth or lying, and whether to challenge their responses to your questions. As in “Ace Attorney,” identifying the piece of evidence that contradicts witness testimony is the most fun part of the game, and “L.A. Noir” does that series one better. In “Ace Attorney,” when you guessed wrong, you had to replay scenes over and over until you got it right, so the challenge was less about getting it right than how quickly you did so. When you guess wrong in “L.A. Noire,” the game just keeps going, and you can even put away the wrong guy for murder. Every time the icon flashes in the corner of the screen to indicate the game is saving, you wonder what you might have done differently — it’s an odd thrill reminiscent of life, where the mistakes are many and the “saving” is continuous.
Unfortunately, the uglier parts of “GTA” still rear their head from time to time. Random pedestrians on the street call out one-liners — “Rehab is for quitters” — to no one in particular, disrupting the serious tone the game works so hard to cultivate elsewhere, and “GTA’s” awkward cover system mars otherwise exciting shootouts.
Still, “L.A. Noire” is the rare adult game to live up to that designation, and provides a memorable, intellectually engaging experience. It’s nice to see the open-world genre finally grow up.
