Review:
L.A. Noire

1947; a time of turmoil, crime and corruption and emerging from the aftermath of the second world war, the citizens of L.A. begin to take the law into their own hands. This sets the scene for the latest offering from Rockstar Games; L.A. Noire (available on both PS3 and Xbox 360). The game’s basis uses detective work and case solving to hunt down criminals of the city. Kind of like C.S.I. meets The Untouchables. Players must use wit and cunning to decipher clues and interpret whether or not suspects are lying. Purely story grounded, there is no multiplayer meaning that all efforts have been put into detail to make L.A. Noire a truly stunning piece of gameplay.

The hero amongst the chaos is detective Cole Phelps; a commended war veteran with a righteous heart keen to rid L.A. of criminal activity. He is of course the main character and the only playable one at that who works his way up the chain of promotion within the police force. Starting out as a patrol officer, Phelps cracks cases of murder, rape and drug trafficking amongst many others to get to the top.

Without a doubt, the key element to this game is the facial recognition, and synchronised speech. For the player to identify a dishonest suspect, characters will make certain gestures such as a deep gulp, shifting eyes or irritability and this could only be shown by actors literally portraying this and it being recorded in motion capture. It becomes quite evident that this is where most of the development time has been spent. The characters may be entirely fictional but the actors in motion capture are not. With this technology, this is the first game that I say could quite easily rival the film industry. By that same stretch, I doubt a film tie-in could ever be made of L.A. Noire because it has already been done backstage. The actors are still there, the emotion is still very real but the only difference is that there are multiple cameras instead of one.