L.A. Noire é um game que eu amava jogar no meu finado Xbox 360. Eu amo a temática, amo a ambientação, amo a trilha sonora, os carros antigos, a estética de filme noir dos anos 40/50. Os personagens são carismáticos, as expressões faciais continuam surpreendentes, ainda mais pra época, embora outros aspectos, como os cabelos, por exemplo, tenham envelhecido um pouquinho mal.

A história é extremamente bem escrita e tem um dos finais mais amargos que eu já vi nos videogames. Toda a gameplay baseada na leitura facial pra deduzir se as pessoas estão mentindo ou não é muito gostosa, a investigação também é bem legal e os casos são tão bem feitos que cada um poderia render um filme diferente.

Tive um bugzinho aqui e outro ali mas nada que prejudicasse a gameplay. O maior defeito de L.A. pra mim continua sendo o fato de que o game não te pune por erros. Tu pode perder estrelas se bater o carro, quebrar propriedade pública, se tu errar perguntas nos interrogatórios e tal. Mas isso não influencia em nada, o game meio que te força a seguir a história independente de tu estar fazendo certo ou não. E isso eu acho muito errado.

Ainda assim, L.A. Noire é um jogo que envelheceu muito bem. Divertido, envolvente e cativante. Poderia ficar horas andando pelas ruas de Los Angeles da década de 40. Não sei o que rolou com a Team Bondi depois de toda a treta envolvendo a produção desse game, mas eu queria muito que a Rockstar pegasse as rédeas e desenvolvesse uma sequência. L.A. merecia uma sequência na geração atual, só de imaginar toda a ambientação e os personagens com aquela expressão facial realista com os gráficos da geração atual, fico babando.

Detalhe, eu finalizei esse game ano passado, mas como só fiz a Platina agora, foi que decidi cadastrar. Deixei ele no drop por muitos meses. Fica aqui o meu vá tomar no cu pra quem teve a ideia de fazer aqueles dois troféus malditos de achar 95 carros e 50 rolos de filme.

L.A. Noire is a hell of a interesting narrative. As a game though? Eh. It's never very satisfying as a game. Half the cases you close have chicanery afoot so you feel wrong even when the game is praising you. The combat isn't anything worth writing home about. Hand-to-Hand fighting is passable. Shooting is light-weight. Feels like you're shooting air.

L.A. Noire presents an open world and similar to Mafia II, the open world is just set dressing. You can explore it I guess, but there isn't much to see. Sure the world is detailed, they spent years crafting it but once you've seen it...that's it. There's hidden cars and landmarks but who cares about either? Street Crimes offer the only other form of content with substance. There's 40 of these, they all have a unique cutscene and action sequence. They're fine, but that's it. Just to give you a little taste of violence in between detective work. They don't even really feel like canon events. Like Herschel Biggs will tell you that he hasn't shot his gun in the life of duty directly after bodying a guy in a car chase.

The game's true shine is the voice acting and facial expressions. Characters like Phelps, Roy Earle and Rusty Galloway feel so real because of their nuanced expressions. Roy's smug, shit eating face, Rusty's seasoned bulldog look. Even in the background you can see great character work just by how Phelps is twisting his face up. Cutscenes are worth rewatching here and there. This really coulda been a TV show. The best parts can just be done by a human being irl.

This coulda been like the greatest Point-n-Click game of all time. I'd still recommend it at a curiosity. The story is worth it. It just doesn't quite translate to the video game medium.

This game is a bumpy road that constantly flip-flops between repetitive gameplay loops and redundancy, to well-written story beats and enticing characters. At the end of the day, this is a game that took me four or so months to beat not for its length, but for its sheer lack of replay-ability. I adore some parts of LA Noire, and find others tedious. The ending is decent, but in no way makes up for the quick exhaustion that comes from hours of doing the same thing over and over. Feels more like a prototype of an idea than an actual fully-fledged and completed idea. I think the kinks of the sloppy motion capture, lack of cutscene skippability and same-y mission structure could’ve been worked out with a sequel, but I don’t think we’ll ever get one. I enjoyed more than I didn’t but I come away disappointed with my experience and don’t find it something I’ll be returning to anytime soon. Oh well, at least I can move on to another game.

A game I plan to return to in the future to experience again. Just an incredible recreation of 1950s LA by the developers at Team Bondi that deserves all the praise in the world. It's only fair to also mention that this game is a product of extreme crunch that unfortunately seems to have adversely impacted many of the devs at Bondi as they made it. I feel so conflicted praising the game but I still believe it is a must-play. One of the most non-traditional open world experiences where I feel like the map and details of 1950s LA serve as their own character, something that speaks to the film noir inspirations this game takes from.

Once upon a time, I picked up this game on release for the Xbox 360. It came out on May 17, 2011 and five days later my world was turned on its head when my town was hit by a devastating tornado. L.A. Noire being the game I was playing at the time, it garnered a sullied reputation by no fault of its own.

Fast forward to 2017 and the remaster that came to PS4 and I decided it was time to conquer this dark spot on my gaming history. And I did. Great game experience. One of the last times I feel like Rockstar did something fun and unique. I love GTA and RDR but I think Rockstar needs to do more stuff like this, Bully, hell, even the Table Tennis game.

This game is just fun.
Pure and simple.
The cases are real, the cops are not…this is…LA NOIRE!
Seriously, did you know the cases are all real? They went through newspaper archives to dig up facts about cases to put in the game.
I think that’s pretty neat.

12 years ago, I LOVED this game.
12 years later, as I anxiously revisit this detective-adventure game, I struggle badly to pinpoint anything positive about the game, because story- and gameplaywise, it aged very, very poorly.

You play as Cole Phelps a Marine Corps lieutenant, just returning from the Second World War, so we are in the late 40s, a time-frame very rarely picked. Our goal is to climb up the career ladder at the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) starting at the patrol service. Even if this environment is already suggesting another Hero’s Journey, this premise COULD have led to an interesting story. But it just did not deliver.

L.A. Noire is a power fantasy through and through. You speak the language of violence and war, screaming at suspects, pointing a gun at them or even shooting them in the back as they are running away from you. The developers at Rockstar are not well known for very sensitive or self-reflexive characters or stories, but with L.A. Noire they reached their pinnacle of ignorance. This game is dripping of problematic tropes: It is full of antisemitism, racism, sexism and unconcealed patriotism. And it is not only the „bad“ guys, who embody this way of thinking, it is you and the structure of police, that is based on violence, discrimination and corruption. It hurts to the bone to get to a crime scene over and over again, to see another femicide, or a raped body or a beaten up immigrant. Most of the cases are build like that. Yes, I can imagine the streets of L.A. in the late 40s, were not the safest place for liberal women or people of color, but to use this „historical truth“, to rebuild and reenact this brutal way of interacting is just not my type.

The L.A. we drive through is a vivid place, atmospherical and you can really feel the will to „build something“, but besides the feel of it, the glimpse, you just can’t do anything in this world - besides a bit of sightseeing. You are limited to your duty, driving from crime scene to crime scene, cutting blocks and avoid another car crash, due to the whacky car controls. The intention is clear, that Rockstar did not want to create another open-world gangster-adventure but quite the opposite. And this would be understandable, IF the gameplay of being a cop thriving for justice and recognition would be interesting and thrilling. But it simply isn’t.

The gameplay loop is boring and hilariously linear. You arrive at a crime scene, investigating it, searching for clues or evidence, waiting for the fulfilling melody to signal you the completion of the scene. Sidenote: This melody is the only thing in the game, that led to a warm nostalgic feeling in my playthrough. After that, you interrogate a witness and this part was sold as the main attraction back in the day with ground-breaking facial motion capture, making it easy to immediately recognize a liar. But this gimmick is just dated and the expressions are not that clearly readable, leading to frustration or the feel of a multiple-choice test. Because the other two options besides accusing someone, are to play the „good cop“ or the the „bad cop“. This means either calmly assume someone is lying or openly yelling or threating them, how they will rod in jail, if they are not cooperating. Then you drive to the next location, either searching for clues, repeating the next inhuman interrogation or chasing a suspect either by foot or by car.

The investigation part is the „best“ as you just shut up and try to do your job for a moment, like you should. But this promising mechanic is just torn down, by the incomprehensible need for action, spectacle and heroism, which leads to a dumb, rail-roaded and tedious experience.

In some cases, you will find newspapers, reporting about the psychologist Dr. Harlan Fontaine, a shady man willing to cure all men from their post-war traumata, a story told in little cut-scenes. The same happens to the backstory of Cole, as we experience little flashbacks of his time in war. These parts are the most promising and intriguing, as we get a glimpse of this collective trauma a war can cause. But the result of this trauma is displayed exclusively in beating your wife, becoming a murderer, an alcoholic or being abused by a narcissistic psychologist.

After replaying eleven cases, I have heard and seen enough. A part of me is sad about the failed replay of one of my favorite games. As a teen, I played this with my sister and I remember, that we enjoyed it. But I grew up and the game did not. And that is why the other part of me is grateful to went through this again. To realize that this type of game and especially the content and values it transfers, does not represent my understanding of the world nor a compelling character, I want to embody. And that does not imply, I only want to play as successful, soft and sensitive characters, which try to „make the world a better place“. Take Disco Elysium as a great example of a game that did it just right: A struggling cop, unable to remember his own name, known as a loser, a tramp, an asshole, but someone who is trying, or to be more accurate: a character thrown into a game that gives you freedom of choice and a feel of consequences and not only the outdated repetition of the binary idea of good and evil.

I've got mixed feelings on this game. There's a lot of tedium to it, having to scour the area to make sure you don't miss a hint leads to you picking up a bunch of useless items most of the time and that's not ideal. There's...far too much uncomfortable content for my tastes, don't think we need an unapologetic pedophile once every three cases, for example. And at no point in the game do they ever develop Cole Phelps in a way that makes me care about him at all. Some of the cases are also very unforgiving with expecting perfection or else you're locked out of the correct ending.

But I had fun driving and seeing all the crashes I cause and how my partner yells at me for it. Shootouts are satisfying to win. The story and how it slowly unravels as you go is interesting.

I like some parts of it and don't like others.

DEDEKTİFLİĞİ İLİĞİME İŞLEDİ

L.A. Noire'yi duymayan yoktur. Çünkü oyunu yapan firma bütün dünyanın bildiği Rockstar Games'e ait. Zamanın ötesine geçip oyundaki karakterlere gerçekçi mimik eklemesi, eski toprak olarak söylüyorum, herkes dillendiriyordu. Hatta oyunun konusu bir yana atılmıştı, sadece " Ulan adamlar mimik eklemiş amuğa goyum" incelemesi yapılıyordu. Peki tüm elementleri birleştirdiğimizde iyi bir oyun mu? Evet, hem de sapına kadar!

Hemen aradan grafikler eski mi, göze batar mı sorusunu çıkaralım. Oyun 2011 çıkışlı. Fakat o senede çıkan oyunların grafikleri net olarak daha iyi. 2010'da çıkan Mafia 2 ve 1 sene sonra 2012'de aynı firmadan çıkan Max Payne 3 ile arasında dağlar kadar fark var. Ama hala grafikler günümüzde oynanır seviyede. Sadece retro görüntüsü vermek için fazla işlemek istememişler sanırım. Diğer bir unsur ise oyun 60 FPS desteklemiyor. 30 FPS kilidi var, gerçekten berbat bir durum ama Unlockeri var, internette bulup indirmenizi öneririm.

Oyuna dönecek olursak, hikayesi şahane oğlu şahane. Oyunda en başını saymazsak 4 masa var. Oyunun en başında normal bir polisiz ve bizim dedektifliğimizi keşfeden müdür veya amir bizi dedektifliğe terfi ettiriyor. Masalarımız, Trafik masası, cinayet masası (benim favorim kesinlikle bu), ahlak masası ve arsonist masası. Masaları tek tek anlatmayacağım çünkü spoilerlı inceleme yazmak istemiyorum. Fakat az ama öz olarak şunu diyebilirim ki, biri bile sizi sıkmıyor. En başta görev görev farklı konular işlenmekte, fakat sonradan bütün aldığımız dedektiflik işleri birbirine bağlanmaya başlıyor. İşte orada zirveye oturdu hikayesi. Temposu, olayı anlatış biçimi (Rockstar bu işi çok iyi yapıyor), sunuş şekli mükemmel. İnsanların mimiklerinden doğru mu yalan mı söylüyor, elinizde kanıtı var mı, yoksa o kanıtı bulamadınız mı? Şüpheli demek daha mı mantıklı? İşte o yaşattığı gerilim ve beyninizi çalıştırması, herkesin deneyimlemesi gereken bir oyun olduğunu düşünüyorum.

Yalnız tek eksisi oyun mekaniği olarak tek düze. Fakat bundan yıldız kırmıyorum zira 2011'de günde 8-9 saat oyun gömen biri olarak söylüyorum, özgürlük veren oyun zaten çok ama çok azdı.

Puanım 4,5 yıldız. Tavsiye eder miyim? Oynamamanız kabahat.