It’s not perfect, but that's the price paid for taking risks. If you’re someone who considers yourself a gaming aficionado, a digital epicurean with varied tastes and an inkling for industry history, then L.A. Noire lacks in sandbox action it makes up for in narrative atmosphere. On top of this is some damn fine writing and a perfectly captured noir movie vibe bolstered by an Oscar-worthy score. Crime scenes are deeper and more interesting now that I’m not trying to sprint-and-prompt-smash my way through them. Interrogations are more compelling now because I haven’t seen countless iterations of them. It succeeds when you’re doing the things few games attempt to do. It fails when it tries to be a Rockstar game and spreads itself thin across an open - but largely empty - world. It’s hard to uncouple the praise for games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Disco Elysium and not see where L.A. Noire felt like a breath of fresh, smoggy air. Like many gamers, I have had my fill of open-world sandboxes the last decade, and revisiting L.A. In part, I’m older (unfortunate) and wiser (fortunate). I hated the game upon release and, even though I finished it, wrote it off as Rockstar’s worst. A lot of fans were disappointed at this new direction, myself included. The initial reception was mixed, a far cry from the universal praise Rockstar normally received. Failure was common, a frustrating result from a studio known for letting you do whatever, whenever, totally consequence-free. State-of-the-art facial graphics allowed players to study suspects eye contact and other cues to suss out lies and half-truths. The chief mechanic of the game wasn’t action, but nuanced investigations that required patience, observation and critical thinking. You couldn’t spontaneously mow people down in your car or unleash a hail of gunfire at random. Instead, players had to actually act like a cop and solve crime instead of causing it. was not the playground for carnage fans had come to expect, however. It dropped one year after the release of Red Dead Redemption, offering players the chance to play as Cole Phelps, a war hero-turned-detective in 1940s Los Angeles. Noire is celebrating it’s ten-year anniversary on May 17, and time has been kinder to Rockstar’s ode to Olde Timey Hollywoodland than fans were at launch.
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