Los Angeles Black

Well, disc 3 complete, credits rolling, the last case closed.  It’s been a marathon.  The girlfriend’s left town for the week and my goal has been to clean the streets of LA from wake ‘til slumber.  Me?  I’m the most determined gumshoe in town…except for the few hours yesterday when I thought it’d be a good idea to play LA Noire stoned and got nearly half my interrogation questions wrong.  This is a game that you need to pay attention to, that’s for sure.  And that’s one of the many things I love.  But…there are some things I don’t, and some of them have to do with narrative and storytelling, so if you’re reading this and haven’t played the game and plan on doing so, know that there is a serious SPOILER ALERT coming your way.  Right now.  SPOILER ALERT.  There.  It’s been said.

First, the loves.  Love the setting.  The city of LA in the 1940s, right after the war, is just a perfect setting for a film noire story.  Team Bondi captured the architecture and the style of it dead-on.  My favorite parts are even attributed to the soundtrack, with the right raps on the drums to get your heart pounding and the screeching violins to get your blood curdled when it’s scary-time — and there are times when it’s actually scary.  When you’re a homicide detective on the hunt for The Werewolf (the guy behind the Black Dahlia killing), it got me so spooked right before bed that I thought I was going to have nightmares.  Granted, I went online and looked at the real B.D. photos because I was like, “hey, let’s learn about shit.”  Bad idea.  That crime scene is a gnarly one indeed.  Poor girl had a run-in with an absolute maniac.  But it doesn’t matter, I didn’t even have one nightmare!  What-WHAT!

The supporting cast is great.  The technology behind all the face-capturing is truly something awesome.  While it loses some fidelity, it gains in the minutia detail that comes with a real actual face.  It’s not an artist’s creation, it’s a human face.  I recognized actors I’ve worked with in the game.  Not only from the sound of their voice, but seeing them and going “hey, that’s so and so!”  That’s pretty damn cool.  Expect to see a bunch of familiar faces from Mad Men.  Some great performances in there; and you can say that and mean it.  Performances.  At times it’s an interactive movie.

All the crime scene stuff is great.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  In fact, if you ask me, it’s one of the best parts of the game.  The stint in the homicide division was my favorite part, and it’s the heaviest in the crime scene stuff.  Seeing clues, a blood trail here, a strangulation mark there, bullet casings, motives, finding all the stuff that’s going to pay off when you press your suspects makes you feel like a proper sleuth.  You need to find the right piece of evidence to break someone in interrogation.  Speaking of, praise, and also my first nitpick.

Interrogation is awesome.  Another favorite part.  Catching glimpses and knowing that fucker in front of you is lying, then pegging them?  It’s legitimately satisfying.  But, I will say there are some frustrating moments where you really couldn’t tell the difference between the three Truth, Doubt, Lie options.  Where you thought you should Doubt, you actually should of pressed Truth.  Vise versa.  And when pressing with the Lie button, it goes into the evidence to back it up, and sometimes the descriptions of the evidence were confusing or lacking in information and you end up making the wrong choice even though you had the right piece of evidence.  But, it was a great part of the game, and if they ever make a sequel (I’m hoping either Starsky and Hutch style 70s or turn of the century Scotland Yard in London) they’ll refine it further.

Other shortcomings are gunplay and driving.  The driving feels overly tuned, with the cars handling like race cars and the turning being super sensitive — while it’s not bad, it pales in comparison to GTA.  The shooting is the same.  While not bad, moving from cover to cover is clunky, some shootouts are so easy they’re done in a matter of seconds, and overall not as slick and flawless as GTA or Red Dead.  And now, my biggest gripe…

You may be like, “this wasn’t really a spoiler”…well, it’s about to be, so you’ve been warned.

I love Phelps as the protagonist.  He’s that tightly wound goody goody that makes you want to punch him in the face as much as root for him.  It’s his by the books nature that makes him (ie: you) get cases closed.  He has so many quirks and details, he so rich in development, he’s got so much going on, especially with his rise and fall and rise again…it makes me wonder WHY THE FUCK DID I START PLAYING A DIFFERENT CHARACTER FOR THE LAST THIRD OF THE GAME?!?!  Nothing against Jack Kelso, he’s the man, he should’ve been my partner at some point…but why switch?  I’ve grown to love Phelps and root for him and pretend I am him, so why pull the rug from under me for no apparent reason and force me to play as someone else?  I hate it when games do that!  Phelps doesn’t even finish the game!  After all that work as Phelps, you play as Kelso to wrap the game up!  Kelso gets to put the bullet in the crazy man, he gets to go after that smug fuck Monroe in his mansion estate…what the shit?  I love that Phelps dies at the end, it’s brilliant, but I should’ve been him when it happened!

Come ON, guys!  And, all that switching around forced you to make up for all the holes with flashbacks and cutscenes and newspaper articles.  There’s even a whole section in time that’s left out where apparently, during the time you’re playing as the troubled but good guy inside Kelso, Phelps is promoted from arson back to homicide.  Wait.  Isn’t that important?  Oh wait.  I guess not.  Now that I’m not even playing as the main fucking character in the story!

I can’t tell you how much that aggravated me.  Strangely enough, I’ve encountered this in games before.  They set a bunch of stuff up, and suddenly you’re playing as someone else, either for a little side mission (which I hate equally as much) or as was the case in LA Noire, the entire third act.  And the game wasn’t set up as this shifting points of view game where you play as multiple characters.  It was set up as you, officer Cole Phelps, cleaning up the streets.  I should’ve known with all the newspaper cutscenes that something wasn’t right.  Why show us what all the bad guys are doing on the other side of town?  A)  It just confuses us, as now I’ll enter an interrogation knowing that the guy is lying (because I just saw the dude doing a bad thing in the cutscene) and then make the wrong dialogue choice and B)  I’d rather have the mystery unfold in front of me as I go and having my mind blown at the end like, “oh my God…it was you, Kawalski…the whole time…you bastard…”  that type of shit.

The story just got lost in itself a little bit near the end.  And when you combine that with the horrible idea to jump perspective, it made for an unsatisfying climax.  BUT…

The majority of the game is a really solid noire genre game.  Working cases and putting baddies behind bars was very satisfying.  As much as you wanted to bust ‘em in dialogue, you wanted them to run so you could have one of many truly epic foot chases.  LA Noire both impressed me and frustrated me.  I can understand why review sites didn’t give it a perfect score, but I’d also say it’s a must-have.  That first three-quarters of the game is undeniably a great experience.

Now if you’ll excuse me, toots, I have to go see what outside in real life looks like.  Catch you on the flip, Jimbo.