L.A. Noire: Across the Threshold

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Charles Francis Moran VI: L.A. Noire is a natural evolution of the sandbox game. Rockstar Games has now added an inspect interface to the gameplay mechanics. Where once you could blow through a Grand Theft Auto just doing missions and skipping cut scenes, this game is much more mature, simply because you really need to pay attention to details. I also don’t think you can skip the cuts scenes, but I haven’t tried.

The interrogation mode is clever and its scoring is interesting. I am sure it will annoy perfectionist and completist gamers. On the downside, using the intuition feature gives an unnecessary social network vibe.

As usual with a Rockstar title, it takes a bit of time for the hook to sink in, but it always does, and I look forward and enjoy the fight.

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Michael Sheridan: I’ve been looking forward to playing L.A. Noire since early last year, so even before

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I sat down to patrol the streets of 1947 Los Angeles, I knew I was likely expecting too much.

The game seemed to get off to a fairly slow start. Scouring the crime scene for a gun was a little slow, as was the backstory scene about a psychology professor. The controls are fairly intuitive and making your way through the city is pretty straight forward. All to be expected with a Rockstar game – L.A. Noire shares many familiar conventions.

Visually, everything looks sharp and clean. The facial animation is quite amazing – far more lifelike than anything I’ve seen before. The body movements, however, aren’t quite as impressive.

Oddly enough, I was very much reminded of the old Police Quest PC games from the 1980s and 1990s (wrote about them here, if you recall). The mixture of grunt police work and note taking felt a little mundane, but proved to be quite challenging. The interrogations are puzzling and you don’t always get a second chance to get it right, which I found intriguing (and a little annoying).

One thing that had me concerned that was not play related: the moment I started playing the game, my PS3 fan never stopped spinning. Clearly this game puts a strain on the system (it appears to be unclear if this is a technical issue or a conflict with the PS3’s latest firmware update – let the conspiracy theories begin!).

I’m not going to say that I was as engrossed as I was in the opening moments of the outstanding Red Dead Redemption, but L.A. Noire definitely has enough elements to keep me playing.

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And there you have it, Team Unwinnable’s initial thoughts. How are you finding L.A. Noire?

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