L.A. NOIRE - XBOX 360 - SPOILERS AHEAD!

[This review contains spoilers]

Okay, so my first review is not that old - LA Noire was published in May 2011. However it is the last game I completed on Xbox and it's still fresh in my mind and I've got some issues with the game design that I'd like to talk about.

LA Noire currently holds a very good Metacritic score of 89%. According to the Metacritic site, eleven publications rated the game as perfect (100%) with numerous 90%+ scores. It's lowest score is 65%. So LA Noire would appear to be a very good to excellent game; and it is, sort of.

The game's central story is set in 1947 and follows Cole Phelps, a rookie LAPD detective and war hero, as he works his way through a series of missions and seeks to climb the slippery pole of promotion. LA Noire's central goal, it seems to me, is as an evolution of the adventure game genre; much has been made of the technology used to render human faces which is admittedly excellent. Indeed, it would seem that LA Noire's desire is to be an interactive movie (I have since heard that if a mission is failed multiple times the game offers a bypass to the player to continue the story).

It is a Rockstar game and it shows: the player's viewpoint is a third person view over Phelps' shoulder, much in the style of Grand Theft Auto, and the player must guide Phelps around the city of Los Angeles, travelling mostly by car to various locations. The main difference being that in Grand Theft Auto players were, for the most part, avoiding the police; in LA Noire the player is a police officer. Sadly, the spectre of GTA hung over the whole of LA Noire for me and while I recognise that they are separate games I found that the mechanics of GTA had been transplanted onto LA Noire, where they are ill-fitting.

Team Bondi, the developers working with Rockstar, have produced a replica of 1940s Los Angeles that has been described as incredibly detailed and realistic. I have a friend who is currently in the process of publishing a book about the author Raymond Chandler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler) who wrote about and lived in LA during that period. He has pointed out real locations in the game, certain shops for instance, where Chandler is known to have frequented. So it would seem that Team Bondi have invested a lot of time in making the city as accurate as possible. However, I have to take this as correct, as I have never visited Los Angeles. I managed to recognise the Chinese Theater and the Hollywood sign (which cannot be reached)but apart from that, I did not know where I was most of the time. I certainly did not recognise LA landmarks from movies, but that may reflect the period the game is set in. There are few skyscrapers in the game and it was difficult to judge when I was properly "downtown".

What I do know is that Team Bondi's creation is enormous. There are plenty of streets, cars and pedestrians to look at and dodge while driving, and the city is pleasantly divided up into inner city areas and differing suburbs. I did not attempt it, but it apparently takes 30 minutes to drive across the whole map. Certainly while travelling to missions during the game I found myself turning to the onscreen map to see if I was nearly there yet - which on reflection cannot be a good thing in a game. There is an option to let Phelps' detective partner drive, which results in a loading screen and quick arrival at your location. However, there are side quests to be received via police radio in the car which you can only receive if the player is driving, so I found that I drove a lot.

There are a lot of period cars in the game (95, if the car driving achievement is to be trusted) and they are all nice looking and faithfully recreated. However, I found that after a 40 hour playthrough I had only used 14 different types of car. It seems if you want to gain the achievement then you need to put the hours in. The game ends once the final mission is completed, so players will need to try to get this achievement in the middle of the game. Which to be honest is a bit of mood killer - LA Noire is set up like a movie with a continuing plot, and felt odd whenever I went off to do a side mission. The character of Phelps and the character of LA itself is so sombre that it never truly feels like the city is there to explore and have fun in. It certainly does not feel right when Phelps is trying the doors of various cars while his partner looks on, with their police car standing nearby. So I found that I stuck to my assigned car more often than not. A further reason is those side missions I mentioned earlier: only police cars can receive them, so the 80 odd non-police type cars are almost redundant to playing the game.

And I did not really explore the city to any great detail. Here, I would argue, is one of the major unintended flaws of the game. LA has been so faithfully recreated that it has turned out to be immensely boring to drive around. I would say that 1940s LA was a city where people lived based on my experience from playing LA Noire, as there are houses everywhere - the city seems to be mostly flat and divided into blocks which generally look like the surrounding blocks. There are shops on some streets, but mainly the game showed houses. Since Phelps is only concerned with completing police missions (or collecting "badges" left around the city) these houses may as well not be there. They are there because it is a faithful recreation of a city - but it makes a dull environment to drive around in. I found myself reminded of the first Assassin's Creed: a city with an enormous area and thousands of buildings, but no connection to the environment for the player.

Combined with this is the performance of the cars in general. While I recognise that the cars in 1947 were not that fast or manoeuvrable, I found the cars in LA Noire to be a massive disappointment. Most were slow and the handling was oddly "pointy": the car would begin to lurch round the corner then would suddenly turn. I found I almost hit a few pedestrians on pavements as the car's nose would invariably hunt them down. By the end of the game I had adapted to this by handbreak sliding around corners and oddly I felt more in control with this method. As many of the game's missions and side missions involve chasing or tailing cars, this was a major failing. I bring up the comparison with GTA here, as this mechanic has been lifted wholly from that series and transplanted into LA Noire where due to authenticity it is just not as fun. The driving is a chore. I cannot offer an alternative to the way it has been implemented and should note that since the game is set in LA, where the car has been dominant for decades over any other form of transport, then it would have been odd for the game not to use cars.

One other point I need to make is that I found the design decisions involving the roads to be rather odd. When in a police car, turning the siren on will encourage cars to move out of the way; cars would always move to the side of the road if they were in motion. However, they would stick to this template no matter what, and I was frequently hit by cars not realising I was there. You may then criticise my driving and question why I did not overtake in the middle of the road - the reason is this: the roads were not wide enough for a car to travel down the middle. I found this frequently infuriating: cars stopped a intersections do not move for the siren and oncoming cars stick to their lane. I forget how many times I judged that the gap was big enough only to go smashing into the front end of some Chevy. For a game where driving is so important to hamstring the player by forcing them to slow almost to a stop at junctions seems perverse. Again, I am reminded of the first Assassin's Creed, where walking above any speed other than slow would instantly result in guards chasing you - a deliberate move by the game to limit what could have potentially been a fun way to travel around the city.

And a further thought has just occurred to me: LA Noire is hurt by the penalties that are placed on the player at the mission's end. Here, any damage you have caused to the city and vehicles is totted up and can affect your mission score (which has no other effect on the game other than hindering your progress towards an Achievement - but more on this later). This makes any crash an irritation, with the effects following you for the rest of the mission, hanging over you. It is my feeling that this penalty was added to mirror the effects that crashing into the police caused in GTA. There, colliding with a police car resulted in a wanted rating and quite often a thrilling chase around the streets as the police hunted you down. These were never too challenging and were often a nuisance if you needed to get somewhere, but they were frequently fun. As LA Noire's Phelps is a member of the police he is merely fined afterwards rather than chased - which can seem incredibly strange if he has mown down some pedestrians.

Anyway, I feel I've become bogged down in discussing minute details of the game, so I'll move on to the main description of the game. LA Noire is divided into a series of cases that are solved one-by-one - no case overlaps with another, but some cases do contribute to an overall story arc. They are mostly formulaic: Phelps is sitting in the briefing room; Phelps and his partner get given an assignment; they drive to the scene of the (mostly) murder, investigate the corpse, wander round and pick up some clues, perhaps speak to a witness or the coroner; drive to a clue, or spouse, or suspect; go to other places to see more clues and talk to more people; before eventually being funnelled into identifying a suspect by the game and then either interviewing them or chasing them and shooting them down.

Phelps' partner, who it should be pointed out is a veteran detective, stands around and follows Phelps and occasionally blurts out some information which is kind of interesting, but does not advance the game. Anything that Phelps discovers is added to his notebook, which can be looked at. The thing I found most disappointing was that there was very little thinking involved for the player to do - clue discovery was a process of wandering around the crime scene or suspect's house/work and pressing the A button occasionally. Locations to visit were added automatically by Phelps and despite the game warning of red herrings, the cases pretty much worked themselves out.

The game's major selling point was the technology used to render human actor's faces, and it works amazingly well. Even pedestrians on the street show a likeness I've not seen in other games. When talking to people, I was often taken aback because I could recognise the actor; of course, that led to potential problems, as often you could tell who the main suspect was from the famous actor playing them. But then any TV detective show suffers from the same problem.

However, I found I dreaded the interviews with suspects, as I could not get a handle on when people were lying. In general I was right about 60 to 70% per cent of the time, but my major problem was that Phelps had such limited questions. Rather than allowing the player to select Phelps' angle or enquiry, the player watches while Phelps asks a question and then they have to decide if the suspect is telling the truth. Often it is easy to see that a suspect is lying, but Phelps must either make a baseless accusation, or make an accusation and back it up with evidence. The problem I found was that frequently I did not know what Phelps was going to say next, so didn't know which evidence to use. For example, in one case a hidden stash of drugs is found in a man's office; when accused of lying about his involvement, the man responded that Phelps had no proof of any drugs, so I chose from the notebook the stash of drugs that was behind his desk. The man laughed in my face and said there was no evidence. I should have chosen another piece of evidence apparently.

I found this infuriating and this inflexibility was repeated on many occasions because I had chosen the evidence based on what I would say about it - there was no way to know what Phelps would say about the evidence. To further compound my misery, once a question is asked it cannot be repeated which seems bizarre and unfair. It is this inability for the game to allow you to investigate the crime by yourself which irritated me the most - most cases seemed to come down to a lucky guess in the interview. The other weird thing about the game was that the interviews seemed to be masquerading as criminal trials; despite a trail of pretty conclusive evidence which in a court would lead to a conviction, it appeared that the most important thing was the interview.

The interviews themselves seemed pretty pointless later in the game, however, as it is revealed that cases Phelps solved were not correct and the suspects were freed. Indeed, I did not actually fail any case (nor do I think it is possible) as the game's obsession with story means that there is only one way to complete each case: the correct way. The first interview Phelps conducts is at the behest of the homicide Captain, Donnelly, who wants a confession, and it immediately gave away the fact that there would be only one way to finish the game. I must have tried that interview four times: each time I failed in the correct order of accusations and was presented with Donnelly screaming in my face, followed by the same opening line of dialogue from the suspect. It all seemed very fake and totally broke any realism the game may have held for me up to that point. I felt uncomfortable investigating, as it seemed I had no control over my line of enquiry: the game was not just holding my hand but forcing me to follow its predetermined path. This was made worse by the fact that I just did not like the story, and found Phelps to be an intensely irritating character.

As I mentioned at the start, Phelps is pretty much fresh out of the army and joins the LAPD (or possibly was a member before the war). The game has frequent flashbacks of Phelps' time during World War II and it quickly becomes apparent that he is not really a nice man despite being a decorated war hero. Indeed, an early flashback shows Phelps apparently conspiring against a former friend, Jack Kelso, to force him out of officer training school - it may be my imagination but Phelps is portrayed here as a toady to the sadistic sergeant. In this one scene I knew I did not like Phelps, which did not bode well for spending 30+ more hours with him. He reminded me very much of Proctor, the idiot toady from the Police Academy films. These flashbacks continue throughout the game and slowly reveal that Phelps, while intelligent, lacked a certain heroic quality in the war - he seems mainly to have been dealing with intelligence reports before being ordered to attack the Japanese. His Silver Star seems to have been earned merely for staying alive in a hole during an attack on a Japanese position (much to the disgust of Jack Kelso, who joined the marines after Phelps stopped him progressing through OCS - although Kelso may have left anyway). Phelps, despite being a ranking officer, seems to be despised by his men; initially, the game seems to be saying that Phelps is sensitive to the Japanese soldiers and treats them well. Further flashbacks seem to show Phelps as inept in combat, with his orders frequently ignored by soldiers. The final few flashbacks show that Phelps lost his way, though. I was taken aback as he suddenly seemed to change personality. The game seems to be saying that he felt guilt for winning a medal by hiding while others died, but I could not see any reason why Phelps, in the final flashback, orders one of his men to torch a Japanese community of civilians to death with a flamethrower. Perhaps he did not mean to - he thought they were soldiers - but Phelps character does not seem consistent through the flashbacks.

Anyway, the game starts without any of this prior knowledge, and I assumed that Phelps was just a guy back from the war who'd seen some awful things, but didn't appear to have any lasting psychological trauma. He seems embarrassed by the attention over his medal, but he has no other problems, which seems completely at odds with his state of mind after discovering that he ordered the deaths of innocent civilians. As the game progresses, Phelps is revealed to be a man of honour and attempts to do the right thing; we know he has a wife and children, but we never see them, nor do we ever get the chance to go home. Phelps must work with a variety of partners, all of whom are either bad investigators or are corrupt, or are simply tired of the job. The only guy who seemed on the level is the second partner in the game, Stefan Bekowsky - I was sad to leave him behind.

Eventually Phelps works his way up to the Vice department after working for Traffic and Homicide; but here the story seems to go into meltdown. His Vice partner, Roy Earle, betrays him after Phelps inconceivably starts an affair with a German singer, Elsa. I have no idea where Phelps got the idea to have an affair with her - Elsa is only a minor character up to that point and Phelps interviews her minutes before they sleep together, with no indication of what was about to happen. Sure, he had been seen watching her sing, but it was so out of the blue that I shouted at the screen in disbelief. What made it all the more unbelievable was that the mission prior to the affair involved Phelps tailing Elsa's car home - so the player became complicit in the affair. There was no choice in the matter - it all just happened. Fine, I can see that it is an attempt to build a complex personality for Phelps - but in story terms it was a clumsily handled one. There was no indication it was going to happen, and Elsa's role is reduced to one of mute acceptance of Phelps sudden advances.

The first time we see Phelps wife is when she throws his belongings out of the door in front of him after the story breaks. Perhaps that is an intentional point of the story - that Phelps is so caught up in his work that he no longer sees his wife, so the player never gets to see her - but it made me question the writing. Who was this woman? Who were his children? Where was the house? I felt no sympathy towards Phelps - he came across as having the emotions of a robot in this scene as I had seen nothing of the relationship with his wife. It was all set up merely to put Phelps in a difficult position from then on - for me, it made me dislike him intensely.

Interestingly, it made me relax a bit more about the suspect interviews. As I said above, I found the mechanics very restrictive and was often wrong with my accusations. However, my festering hatred for Phelps helped somewhat, as I soon found myself not caring whether I was right or wrong in interviews: the case would work itself out, I certainly wasn't going back to replay cases to try to get 5 star ratings; and to be honest, when I looked at Phelps' face, I thought, there's no way this dickhead is a good cop. So I was quite happy for him to get interviews wrong.

The story eventually winds up with Phelps suspended, demoted, and told to stop working on the case which will wrap up the rather meandering story which has been building for the whole game. It is at this point that a small ray of sunshine occurs: Phelps asks Jack Kelso to help him out. Playing as Jack Kelso is pretty much the same as playing as Cole Phelps, with one crucial difference: you are no longer playing as that idiot Cole Phelps. Having thought about it, I have no idea why Team Bondi chose Cole Phelps as the player's avatar: he is painted as being spineless, nasty and perhaps psychotic in the flashbacks and for all his talk of doing things the right way to his partners he betrays his wife for no other reason than he suddenly got an urge after interviewing Elsa, the German singer. At least GTA IV's protagonist Nico was a sympathetic character - I could understand his motives. And sure, Kelso is no angel - he seems to enjoy fighting and killing people, and has no qualms about facing off against mobsters, but at least he stays consistent to his own beliefs.

The other thought I've had is that Kelso almost becomes a private investigator by the end of the game. When I think of the heroes of film noir and Raymond Chandler books, it's never the image of a policeman I have in my head: I think of the grey faced figure outside the law, probably booze-soaked and pennyless, but ultimately with a heart of gold. Perhaps next time, Rockstar?

I've been very harsh in this review. For all my complaints, LA Noire is a technological marvel. Team Bondi sadly folded not long after LA Noire shipped and I think it would be a great shame to lose the facial technology they developed. However, I think some choices made in the design of the game were poorly made: the wrong character was chosen to follow, a character I had no sympathy for; perhaps, for an entertainment game, 1940s LA could have made a bit more exciting with more things to do; and that the mission style of GTA were an ill-fitting choice for an adventure game.

I was really looking forward to LA Noire and I feel very irritated by the game. The last time a game irritated me this much was when I completed Pariah on the first Xbox; which coincidentally is my next review...