LA Noire - Final Thoughts
This is a neat game in some regards, but I don't know that it's a very good game.
The facial recreation tech that they created for the game gave me my first moment of "wow, look at these graphics" that I've had in years. The idea of trying to determine if someone is lying based on eye and facial muscle movements is really interesting, and being able to create a simulator for that is pretty cool. The practice is a bit rough at times, especially when it comes to calling people on lies, but the execution is otherwise pretty neat.
It's the rest of the game that has difficulties. Being a detective game, you walk around, and you spend a large amount of time walking around looking at beer bottles and old cigarettes. It's logical, but it's pretty weird. Thing is, adventure games (take Sam & Max, for example) have been doing this, and making it fun, for ages. LA Noire's approach of doing essentially the same thing, in a third-person view, causes this process to be much longer and more frustrating.
There's quite a bit of other mundanity about the game, like driving ten minutes to crime scenes. These sequences are highly skippable, and you'll end up making use of the skipping because you do so much driving, but why have them in there at all? The answer, I think, is that Rockstar has a reputation for creating open world games where you can drive cars around and pick up missions, because of the Grand Theft Auto series. Indeed, while driving around, you can pick up tasks to from on the police radio, but this stuff seems at odds with the feel of the rest of the game, a distraction from the job you're supposed to be doing. The game has a lot of drive forward in it, but tries to divert you to the side all the time. This felt at odds with the rest of the game, to me.
You get rated on pretty much everything you do in this game, but it doesn't seem like much of it matters. No batter how badly I did (though, never deliberately badly - I could have done worse), it didn't seem like the bad guy was able to ever elude me. Given that, it seems a bit weird to rate me on how many clues I find at a scene, or how many questions I got, or the damage I did to city property, if none of it matters in the slightest. I have this theory that what games give you feedback on effects how you play the game: Mario gives you a satisfying tone every time you pick up a 1up mushroom or coin, and always shows you how many of each you have, which encourages you to go find more of them. LA Noire gives you the same type of feedback, but none of the things tracked really seem to effect the storyline. Worse, the game sometimes doesn't make it clear on what you wrong in a given sequence, so if you do care about doing well, it's difficult to modify your plan to accomplish that. I found this incredibly frustrating during the first ten hours of the game, but later, after I realized that I ought not to care about the feedback, and just ride it out, I was able to enjoy myself more.
(Red Dead: Redemption had this problem too, of the game providing feedback that seemed irrelevant. The game tracked your reputation and good or evil deeds, and assigned you a description based on those deeds, and people would react to you accordingly. However, any time you entered a cutscene, this version of your character was set aside while the story version of Marsden would behave like a jackass. For example, I'd typically go out of my way to help people who were being attacked on the street, while Story-Marsden would see the trouble, shrug, and say it wasn't his problem.)
The interviewing sequences are probably the highlight of the game, but they're bloody frustrating at times. Like I said above, you'll often fail at something, and it's not clear why a bit of evidence doesn't prove a lie. Phelps is sometimes an asshole, or sometimes extremely pleasant to people for no discernable reason. Frankly, I found the interview sequences in The Devils Playhouse, Episode 3 more playable, more interesting as a mechanic, and more enjoyable. Though, obviously, the goals in these were different, but I thought that Telltale did an amazing job with that sequence, and I can't help but compare the two.
Anyway, I don't know that I want to spill many more keyboard strokes on this game. I enjoyed bits of it, especially towards the end, and the interviewing sequences were interesting, but flawed. The facial capture technology could go somewhere interesting, but for right now, I don't know that I got that much out of this game, except that it seems like it'll be manditory playing for my podcasts in the near future.