Black-and-White Morality
an L.A. Noire review
It was a hazy September day when an article came into my RSS aggregator that made me sit up straight.
“L.A. Noire is coming to the Switch,” it said, right from the get-go. Maybe it knew that was all of the introduction it needed.
“L.A. Noire?” I barked back. I set my La Croix on my desk and leaned in closer. “I haven’t heard that name in five years. Is this some kind of joke? Who sent you?”
“Polygon.com,” said the article as it set its title down at the top of the window.
Polygon. As much as I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing, Polygon wasn’t the type to mess around. So I checked. I hopped into a new tab and peeled out for the Polygon homepage. I had to let my hands do some talking to find out what I needed to know (the Polygon search function is well-hidden and not one of the better blog search functions out there), but eventually I got through. And there it was, clear as crystal. L.A. Noire is coming to the Switch.
I made my way over to L.A. Noire’s usual haunt and pulled up a seat at the bar. Smokey was working that night. We go way back. I tell him what I’m after and he points me to a fancy-looking man over at one of the tables. I sit down and I can already see him sweating. I don’t waste any time.
“I’m looking for L.A. Noire.”
“Well, I don’t know what that’s got to do with me.”
“Word around here is you’ve taken an interest in her. Taught her some new things.”
“Maybe I have. Who are you?”
I hand him my card. “Chris Fincher. Reviews You Can’t Use.”
“You must think you’re a tough guy. Telling me what reviews I’m supposed to use.”
“Look, pal, you wanna use them? That’s your funeral. But you don’t know what you’re in for. Turgid prose. Self-righteous indignation. You want focus? You’re not getting it here. And I take a special interest in games that are so old that no one cares about them anymore. Which brings me back to the business at hand.”
I can tell that last bit got to him. “Wait here. You’re lucky I won’t tell her you said that.”
When that happened, I’d had L.A. Noire sitting in my Steam library for some time now. There’s a variety of qualities it has that has made it seem like an obvious choice for a long time: I like crime dramas, I like L.A., Rockstar makes good stuff, etc. But there were always other games distracting me. L.A. Noire hitting the Switch brought it to the front of my mind and gave me a reason to finally explore it, and the fact that I had procured a physical copy of it gave me motivation to play and finish it before its resale value dropped.
The Switch version of the game makes few modifications to the L.A. Noire content that existed before it. It adds rudimentary motion controls that are great for firing a gun but otherwise frustrating. It changes the labels on the actions you can take in an interrogation from “Truth”, “Doubt”, and “Lie” to “Good Cop”, “Bad Cop”, and “Accuse”. It adds some bonus collectibles. And it, well, zhooshes up the graphics a bit. Otherwise, it plays the same.
Let’s get something out of the way. Sometimes a remastered game takes advantage of modern hardware and more resources to fix its most glaring errors or run more smoothly. You can tell that, even though the code was reused, the game was given the scrutiny that any game released today would get. This is not one of those games. The game card contains only a portion of the game, and you must download the rest before you can play. DLC cases, which make sense if you know they happen out-of-sequence, are thrown in with the other cases in contradictory spots, without a notification that they’re bonus plot. Textures, if you drive fast enough, will fail to load in time, making blocks of buildings suddenly pop into being well after they’ve entered your vision. And the new interrogation interface, while stylish and well-suited to handheld play, was obviously not fully play-tested.
This is, in other words, a bad port. But a bad port of a good game can still be fun, and L.A. Noire is a good game.
In L.A. Noire, you play Cole Phelps, who, after a tour of duty in the Pacific Theater of World War II, has settled in Los Angeles and joined LAPD. Over the course of the game, you guide him through his ascent of the detective ranks at LAPD, solving crime after sinister crime. There are occasional gunfights, but for the most part, this is more like a point-and-click adventure. You search landscapes for clues that unlock the next part of the plot, and you spend a significant amount of your time navigating dialogue.
The dialogue system was, at the time this game first came out, its crown jewel. Rockstar was very proud of the motion capture they had employed to model the faces of speaking characters, and even today, it looks pretty good. Well, usually.
Some of this dialogue will be interrogation. Interrogations in this game, as I mentioned, use a Good Cop, Bad Cop, Accuse system: you select one of the three options after each answer. You’re supposed to select Good Cop if the witness was telling the truth, Bad Cop if the witness was lying but you can’t prove it, and Accuse if you can prove the witness is lying. It’s both enjoyable and frustrating. You see, sometimes the situation doesn’t map cleanly onto the three options. For instance, the witness might be lying, but it’s unclear what you should say they’re lying about. You will find yourself, sometimes, having multiple pieces of evidence that can disprove a lie, but it’s the one that only disproves that lie that’s the right answer. Or, perhaps, I am not good at this. I only have a sample size of one. Perhaps my path in life is the one blazed by George Wood: earnestly reviewing video games that I’m bad at.
There is also something special about this game if you live in L.A. or if the city is otherwise close to your heart. L.A. Noire’s Australian team put a lot of work into highlighting elements of the L.A. of the past that have faded away. While some of the city within the game is fictionalized, you’ll nonetheless come out of it having seen cliffs in Downtown and buildings long since demolished. I, for one, cannot help but mourn the old Los Angeles County Hall of Records.
All in all, you get a game that, to modern eyes, feels experimental or unfinished. The graphics are pretty good, but they slip up, and you notice it. It has an open world (because Rockstar), even though you can’t cause the chaos that makes an open world fun, because you’re a police officer. So instead, you just tediously drive from place to place. Or you can skip the driving, which just makes me question why it’s there. You get the feeling that with a bit more time, they could have cut out the things that weren’t working and polish up the things that were, and sell it for, oh, $30. Alas, that is not how games on consoles work. Still, I think this is a flawed experience most will enjoy.
Well, unless…
Spoilers begin here.
Unless you overthink things like this. In which case it might bother you that you put multiple innocent people in jail over the course of the game. And, of course, that happens in real life, but in the game, you get evaluated on whether you manage to get them charged. You get more points for some suspects than others. Even though none of them did it!
I suppose the game is, if nothing else, realistic.
Final Score: 10/17
