Review: L.A. Noire

As I continue to work my way through reviewing the substantial pile of games I’ve played this year, this week I find myself encountering another Rockstar Games offering: L.A. Noire. In this interactive crime drama, you accompany detective Cole Phelps he slogs through a morass of dirty cops, corrupt politicians, and mutilated corpses in an attempt to bring order and justice to 1940’s Los Angeles.

Design 3/5

At first glance, L.A. Noire looks like a typical Rockstar Grand-Theft-Auto-style game, in that you have a car and an absolutely enormous city to drive around in. However, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. This is not a sandbox game, so anyone expecting it to be one will be sorely disappointed.

The bulk of the gameplay comprises a linear sequence of missions (“cases”), most of which follow a set structure. Upon arriving at a crime scene, the first thing you do is collect evidence, which basically involves wandering around and randomly picking up objects for Cole to stare at intensely, until he deems them either interesting or not. The second major component of Cole’s detective repertoire is interrogation. Throughout each case you will put a number of suspects and witnesses in the hot seat; after each of their responses, you must decide whether to (1) trust their statements, (2) doubt that they’re telling you the whole truth, or (3) accuse the scumbag in question of being a big fat liar.

Hi!  My name’s Cole, and I’ll be accusing you of murder today.

As game mechanics go, L.A. Noire’s is on the more innovative side, but there’s certainly a lot of issues. With such limited options for questions and responses, the interrogations proceed fairly clumsily, and I usually felt like I was more or less choosing Cole’s responses at random. Furthermore, Cole suffers from what I call the “Renegade Complex”. (The name is a reference to a similar issue I encountered in the original Mass Effect.) Since you don’t exactly know what Cole’s responses will be, you have no idea if an option like “doubt” means “try to outwit a tight-lipped witness with some pointed questioning”, or if it means “start screaming at a 12-year-old girl who just found out her mother was murdered”. In other words, I found it difficult to play Cole in a way that didn’t make him come across as borderline schizophrenic.

These issues are exacerbated by the fact that you’re trying operate within the context of an overarching plot line. Whenever things don’t add up (and often they won’t), it’s unclear whether you missed something in the current case, or if some hidden fact will be revealed in a later one. Put all these issues together and the end result is somewhat unfulfilling, such that even cases I solved “successfully” felt more like a product of luck than skill.

Artistic 5/5

The visuals of L.A. Noire are absolutely stunning. I found the most impressive part to be incredibly detailed faces and expressions of the characters, a product of sophisticated new motion capture technology. I’m not sure exactly how this technology works, so let’s just assume it works exactly like the digitization laser from the movie Tron.

You’ll easily recognize a number of familiar television actors who lent their likenesses to the game, including Aaron Staton from Mad Men (who plays Cole Phelps), Greg Grunberg from Heroes, and the crazy old dude from Fringe.

I’m pretty sure Matt Parkman has the advantage here, considering he’s a psychic and everything.

Unfortunately, the city itself is a lot like a beautiful Hollywood starlet: breathtakingly beautiful, but pretty light on substance. Without the gamut of activities and side quests typical of a sandbox game, the world of L.A. Noire something is you merely pass through, rather than truly engage in.

Narrative 4/5

A lot of critics have compared L.A. Noire to the movie L.A. Confidential. Plot-wise I see some similarities; for example, I didn’t really follow either of them very well. There are a lot of characters, and the fact that most of them are terse, emotionally-repressed assholes doesn’t make understanding their particular motives any easier. The game also seems to presuppose a certain knowledge of historical events (such as the Black Dahlia murder) of which I was clearly lacking. However, the dialogue is well written and well acted, so individual scenes are eminently watchable, even when you have no idea how they fit together.

Gameplay 2/5

And now the kicker… despite all of its polish and beauty, when it comes down to it, I just didn’t find this game fun. The lack of enjoyment could be my fault, because I didn’t know what to expect, or it could be L.A. Noire’s fault, because it doesn’t know what it wants to be. If I had to guess at a genre, L.A. Noire is more like a puzzle game than anything… but with so many flaws in its core gameplay mechanics, it’s hard to feel like there’s any puzzle you’re actually solving.

A riveting scene from an upcoming episode of CSI: Los Angeles. Before the advent of modern technology, crime scene investigation consisted mainly of standing in a circle around dead bodies and talking.

Incidentally, I even bought the “Rockstar Season Pass” and downloaded all the DLC, but by the time I was done with the game, I didn’t feel like playing any of it. I would say that’s not a great sign.

Summary

Just because something’s new and different doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because a studio takes a chance, doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. L.A. Noire is certainly ambitious, but I feel it falls a bit short, and I’m just not in the habit of giving A’s for effort. The best thing I can say about the game is that it looks like it pushed the technological envelope in a lot of ways, the benefits of which we may be seeing for years to come.

Review: Grand Theft Auto IV

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been a bit off the grid these past few months, picking through disarrayed bits of my post-graduate-school-life and trying to rebuild something resembling a normal, healthy human being. Of course, what better way to get with the times than by reviewing a game that’s more than three years old? This week I’ll be reviewing Grand Theft Auto IV, which is actually something like the eighth or ninth title in the franchise. (Apparently Rockstar Games has decided to take their sequel-counting conventions from Square Enix, makers of the upcoming title Final Fantasy XIII-2(a), Part 3, Paragraph 5.)

Design: 5⁄5

After making the genre of sandbox games their bitch with their breakout title Grand Theft Auto III on the PlayStation 2, Rockstar has consistently refused to mess with a good thing. Thus, the basic structure of GTA4 is identical to previous games. As protagonist Niko Bellic (a swarthy ex-military Serb with a receding hairline), first you complete a mission, then you run around in a giant city doing whatever the hell you want with little-to-no consequences until you get bored, and then you advance the story by doing another mission. In this game, your playground is once again Liberty City, although it has evolved from the generic metropolis of earlier GTA games into a full-blown parody of New York City, replete with the Rotterdam Tower (modeled after the Empire State Building) and the “Statue of Happiness”.

I don’t know if it’s the accent, the hair, or the sociopathic tendencies, but the ladies sure seem to love this guy.

The thing that impressed me the most about this game is the same thing that blew me away the first time I saw GTA3, namely the sheer size and scope of the environment. Liberty City is absolutely massive, and you can zip around all four major islands without having to sit through a single loading screen. Furthermore, while you’re tearing around the city you’ll run into (and over) a surprising number of NPC’s, each exhibiting some fairly sophisticated artificial intelligence. (They still largely suck at driving, though.)

In fact, if I had to pick a design flaw in this game, I’d have to say it’s the total lack of mission checkpoints. A few of the missions are quite long and challenging, and nearly all of them start with a long drive accompanied by expository NPC dialogue. That means after the second or third time attempting a mission, you’re about ready to shove whatever chatty derelict is in your passenger seat right into oncoming traffic.

Artistic: 5⁄5

For a game that’s aged three years by the time I’ve written this, it still looks amazing. From its dark, gritty slums to its bright, vibrant tourist spots, Liberty City really does look and feel alive. To get the full effect, make sure you take a helicopter ride at some point.

Liberty City looks so real, you can practically smell the urine right through your TV.

Of course, you can’t spell Grand Theft Auto without “auto”, and this game features a nearly overwhelming selection of makes, models, colors, and styles, ripe for the taking and rendered in exquisite detail. Steal a car and smash it up, get it dirty and then take it to a car wash, get it fixed and then drive it off a pier... it all looks great.

Narrative: 3⁄5

Rockstar really tries to work a story into this game, and I respect that. Unfortunately, when it comes to the sandbox genre, a cohesive plot and player freedom are almost always at cross-purposes.

“Air traffic control” is just one of Niko’s many areas of expertise.

For example, no matter how dark and troubled Niko’s past, I can’t imagine how it could be bad enough to reasonably excuse his carefree attitude toward vehicular manslaughter (which constitutes the majority of how he spends his time, at least when I’m controlling him). Maybe the moral nuances of the plot would have been more compelling if I had engaged in less wanton, senseless violence in between missions... but honestly, asking me to show restraint while playing a GTA game would be like asking me to count calories at an all-you-can-eat bacon buffet. It’s just cruel.

Gameplay: 4⁄5

On the surface, one would think I had fun playing this game... however, the truth is that after the first 10 hours or so, I honestly started to think, “You know, this isn't as much fun as I thought it was.” (Believe me, I was as surprised as you are.) I can think of a few possible reasons for this phenomenon:

1. The lack of checkpoints, which made some of the missions (including the final one) extremely frustrating.
2. The sheer size of the city. Liberty is so big that to drive anywhere takes quite a while, and so by the end of the game, I was pretty much just taking taxicabs everwhere to fast travel. Maybe GTA isn’t as much fun without the “A”.
3. One ill-conceived achievement, which rewards you for completing the story missions in less than 30 hours. Why someone would reward you speeding through a sandbox game is beyond me, but what’s worse is that I still tore through the last third of the missions to make sure that I got it. Anyone who’s read this post knows I can't resist an achievement, no matter how much it ruins my gameplay experience.
4. Perhaps prolonged exposure to ultra-violence actually started to bother me on some sort of psychological level. This explanation seems the least likely.

Regardless, there was something not quite right about this game for me, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. (I suppose there’s nothing more pointless than a critic saying he doesn’t like something, but doesn’t know why.)

Summary

GTA4 may have made some amazing technical strides, for the most part it plays like any other modern Grand Theft Auto game. If you’re in the mood for engaging in another title from that fine pedigree, GTA4 should be more than worth your time.

Review: Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption is the most recent adventure from Rockstar Games, veterans of open-world game design. Set in 1911 in a fictitious land near the U.S. border with Mexico, Red Dead Redemption takes place during a unique time in American history: the decline of the Old West as technology, society, and the federal government work to “civilize” the last of the Western territories. It follows the story of John Marston, a reformed outlaw whose wife and son are kidnapped by government agents. In exchange for their return, Marston must hunt and execute members of his former gang... men he once considered family.