Tuesday, June 14, 2011

LA Noire

So I finished LA Noire.  For those rare readers not actually in the game industry or hardcore gamers, L.A. Noire is a modern open world game where you play a detective in 1940’s Los Angeles.  It’s meant to basically be a video game version of an Ellroy novel, with original material.  Since it’s an open world game, initial expectations included a GTA style sandbox to play in.  No such luck here as L.A. Noire is basically a by-the-numbers linear adventure game set in an open world.

I’m going to post overall thoughts first, then I’ll put a more detailed spoiler section together to get into more specifics for those who have finished the game.

When I first started playing L.A. Noire, what struck me was many similarities to a Nintendo DS game entitled “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney”, wherein the player takes the role of the titular attorney charged with defending all manner of suspects in a culture where guilty until proven innocent is the rule of the day, and, in fact, one must find the perpetrator of the crime before one is allowed to go free.  The game is silly and has overall silly themes with a few odd moments of gravitas, since, after all, some of these cases are murder cases.  The basic mechanics are find clues and then during the course of cross examining a witness, catch them in enough lies to prove their guilt or at least begin to prove your client’s innocence.  Phoenix Wright is a fantastic game and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

L.A. Noire covers very similar territory, the basic gameplay is that you find clues and interview witnesses in order to determine what happened.  Clues are used to catch witnesses in lies, and the cases all progress in a linear fashion.  You never quite get to court, and you’re not “defending” someone, but the overall premise turns out to be very similar.  There is one key difference, however, L.A. Noire does overstay its welcome, at least for me.

The tone of L.A. Noire is quite a bit more serious as you’re put in the shoes of Cole Phelps, a returning war hero with a mysterious past.  You are an earnest and honest cop, something of a rarity in 40’s LAPD, apparently and you’re constantly searching for the truth despite what other police officers and even your superiors might want.  It’s an interesting character to some degree, but very much an archetype.  The past, which you eventually uncover, that they give Phelps is compelling, but ultimately feels more like a gimmick than something that adds real depth to the character.  As you play the game, Phelps’ career moves through several “desks” of detectives, changing depending on the crimes Phelps investigates. Each desk feels like a separate episode in the “L.A. Noire novel series”, basically.

The clue searching mechanics are interesting at first, but quickly get somewhat repetitive where basically it’s a 90’s adventure game, but instead of hunting for a pixel with a mouse cursor, you’re hunting for a vibration with the controller in 3d.  This is somewhat compelling at first mainly for its novelty, but the novelty wears off.  At this point the mechanic isn’t bad, as long as it’s in service of a good story.  The adventure game like clue hunting sections are broken up with driving, shooting, and melee fighting  sections.  The shooting sections, at least, can usually be skipped if the player loses enough times, with no detrimental effects to the player.  This is an interesting idea and I can actually see it work pretty well, though I played through all the shooting sections.

The shooting mechanics are serviceable if uninteresting, though the cover mechanics are horribly broken, and to my mind, unshippable.  The only saving grace is that generally the shooting sections are ridiculously forgiving, so it rarely becomes frustrating, even if it looks kind of silly.

The driving is likewise broken with some of the worst feeling vehicle mechanics I’ve met.  Excuses can be made about it being 1940’s cars, but I know a good vehicle friction model when I feel one, and L.A. Noire doesn’t have one.  This is especially frustrating as the open world is built with protrusions in the middle of key driving areas that the player gets easily hung up on, forcing a failure in chase missions. The other type of driving missions, follow missions, are exactly as fun as they are in other open world games.  That is to say, no fun at all, and tedious in the extreme, if not very difficult.

I found the fist fighting sections to actually be something of a pleasant diversion.  The melee system is dead simple, allowing dodging, blocking, and a few different attack types.  There’s something of a rhythm to the melee and it’s generally pretty forgiving

The other core mechanic is interviewing witnesses to determine if they’re lying.  This is both the game’s highlight and biggest disappointment.  The much ballyhooed facial scanning technology comes into play here with actors basically being scanned in for a digital performance, and players expected to carefully watch the performance to determine whether the witness/suspect is lying or not.  On paper, this sounds like it would never work due to the performances not being good enough.  Interestingly enough, I actually feel like they nailed that, and generally I could tell when someone was lying or holding something back, and when I wasn’t able to tell, it generally felt like it was my fault.  The problem with the system is the options you’re given.  Truth, Lie, and Doubt.  To my mind, lie should be a stronger version of doubt, and there should be some spectrum to the questions, rather than 3 discrete answers.  The way the mechanic actually works is you need to remember the clues you’ve uncovered so far, and if you have a contradiction, you have to select “lie”, if you read the face as not being honest, but you don’t have any clues to prove a contradiction, you should select “doubt'”, otherwise you should select “truth”.  Problems come into play when you haven’t found all the clues, can tell that someone is lying, and select “doubt”.  This ends up being the wrong choice, even though it feels right and it’s incredibly difficult to tell that it’s not the right answer.  At least it was for me.  The entire “doubt/lie” mechanic feels poorly thought out and confusing and severely damages an otherwise amazing mechanic. 

As for the open world, there are a few random street crimes that have the player chasing down a perpetrator and stopping them, aside from that, the open world is completely wasted and simply window dressing.  There are no sandbox mechanics whatsoever and the incredible amount of time and money spent on building this world would have been much better spent elsewhere in the game.  Technically the open world performs well with little sign of LOD popping or low res geometry coming to the forefront. 

Graphically the game is interesting but nothing much special, aside from the facial animation and artwork which is fantastic.  The overall graphics are  nowhere near on par with Grand Theft Auto IV in my view, but it’s not a bad looking game. 

To sum up the spoiler-free section, it’s an interesting game with a few interesting, if broken mechanics, which might even work, if the story, writing, and characters were great, which, in my opinion, unfortunately, they aren’t.  Reasons why can be found in the spoiler section, immediately following. Ultimately I found the game to be a disappointment, never quite making good on its promise.

BEWARE, SPOILERS, TURN BACK NOW MORTAL!

Uniform/Traffic Desk:

This part works beautifully for me: somewhat interesting cases, getting my feet wet with the mechanics, hinting at a deep backstory for the protagonist all wrapped up in a fairly high production value package.  Sucked in.  Not sure why I’m so engrossed but I want to keep playing.

Murder Desk:

Starts off strong, interesting cases, serial killer aspect, referencing real events with the Black Dahlia, pretty damn awesome… at the beginning.  As time goes on, I’m more and more sure that the people I’m arresting aren’t responsible for the crimes, then all of a sudden I’m very sure, now I’m kind of annoyed that I have to arrest innocent people, suspension of disbelief is broken.

Finally, the clues are coming together, we trace the killer back to his hideout, confront him, and THE KILLER IS REVEALED TO BE………

The temp bartender I briefly talked to in a couple of the cases?

Really?

Are Velma and Daphne going to show up?

Do I at least get a scooby snack?

You’re seriously going to make a James Ellroy referencing game, with similar elements and even use the same case for inspiration, and the ending is going to be a  SCOOBY DOO ENDING???

EPIC FAIL.

At this point I no longer have any faith in the game to tell me a decent story.  I’ll keep playing ‘cause I’m invested, but this is pretty disappointing.

Vice Desk:

Now my partner is someone the game has already taught me to dislike and Cole seems completely oblivious to this fact.  Roy Earle is obviously a bad guy from before you even get transferred to Vice and somehow Cole just trusts him throughout the entire sordid affair.  Chasing down the heroin racket isn’t as interesting as the red lipstick murders anyway and at this point I’m in full grind mode where I barely even care about the game.  Roy is a caricature of a corrupt cop, Cole is an oblivious hero character archetype, and the interactions between the two are obvious and frankly poorly written and uninteresting.  The outcome is inevitable and obvious, and the twist of Cole actually having done something wrong feels more like a cheap gimmick rather than some hidden depth to his character.  They took the payoff without doing enough work to set it up and it feels totally tacked on.  Super lame. Especially since you never even meet Cole’s family in order to see why what he did was so wrong.

Arson Desk:

Now I can barely get myself to play the game.  They don’t even bother fleshing out the Arson partner, just murkily mention that he’s difficult to get along with.  The cases are somewhat interesting, but it’s really a grind at this point and I might not even finish the game, until…

They put me in Jack Kelso’s shoes, which is actually a pretty interesting twist and I really liked it.  It helped the end of the game out immensely and got me re-interested in the game.  Kelso still doesn’t quite have a 3 dimensional character but he’s a nice counterpoint to Phelps and it was interesting to work cases from a different angle, even if my suspension of disbelief couldn’t handle that an insurance company investigator gets to call the police information robot from the future…. err…. police operator to get information.  Also why is he able to carry a gun?  It’s very weird.  The ending played out in an interesting way, and even though they still didn’t do the work to pay off the “reveal” at the end, it’s not quite as bad as the murder investigation. 

Overall the story is pretty weak.  I’ve read a number of reviews that have talked about the great characters and writing, but I’m sorry, if you don’t tack the damning with faint praise tag “for a video game” on the end of that sentence it’s just laughable.  Watch L.A. Confidential and then come back and play this game and tell me that there is good writing or characters.  It’s so rare to see a game that isn’t sci-fi or fantasy have a story that’s even remotely well put together that I suppose this game looks good by comparison, but I found it to be a big disappointment and I really think we should expect more of our industry.  I actually think, had the story been better, I would probably have loved this game.  As it stands, I found stuff to like, but overall I have a hard time recommending it.  The broken mechanics really hurt as well, and taken as a package, I think it comes up pretty short. That’s not to say it’s a terrible game, I’m just not sure if it’s a good game, and if it is, I certainly don’t think it’s a great game.  I guess my review had a pretty weak ending too.  I hate to waffle, but there is some genuinely interesting stuff going on with this game, and I think game developers are doing themselves a disservice if they don’t at least give it a look.  That said, there’s enough crap here that I hope the industry doesn’t follow this game too closely.