Developed by Rockstar Games and Team Bondi out of Australia, L.A. Noire takes into the life of Cole Phelps, a World War 2 Military service man that’s out to make things right by joining the L.A. police force. Around those days L.A was a different place and there were a lot of serial killers as well as copycat killers and although it seemed like a pleasant place the crime situation and corruption was huge. Your job while playing this game is to investigate and find evidence of foul play and get these bad guys into prison or out of the hook.

What makes this game stand out is looking at the facial expression of the people you interrogate and you really do have to look at these faces and basically use your instinct in order to determine whether their lying or telling you the truth. There will be times in which you will fail and that is because sometimes the faces can be a little tricky. Iin one instance you will notice a character in the game that will mislead you and make you think that their telling you the truth when in fact it’s a lie. The graphics are exactly what we were expecting from Mafia 2, but the folks over at 2K failed to bring this to their game. Luckily for us Team Bondi came in with L.A. Noire and showed 2K games how video games are supposed to be created especially with a 1940’s theme.

The Gameplay

One of the important things when reviewing a game is to tell the reader of the basic gameplay. As you probably know and those that do not know, L.A noire has very big similarities to that of Grand Theft Auto except that with GTA you have a huge variety of vehicle selection. This game only has cars and that can be kind of frustrating, because the map is really huge and that means you have drive for a long to get to a far away location, which makes things very repetitive.

As far as gameplay goes it’s simple you drive around different parts of the city and investigate the variety of cases, get the evidence together and get things done.

The Landmarks

The graphics and technology on this game is quite impressive and if you have been to Los Angeles and have visited Hollywood you will probably agree. There are landmarks that you can drive to that simply look the same as if you were actually there. Last time I was in Los Angeles I visited the “Pueblo de Los Angeles” an old plaza from back in the day when Los Angeles was a Spanish territory. If you visit the actual place in the game you feel like your there especially if you been there. There are many landmarks in the game such as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Egyptian Theatre, L.A. County Art Museum, The Hollywoodland Sign, Hotel Roosevelt and many others.

Our Criticism

Although the game is nearly perfect there were a few imperfections on it and as we mentioned earlier the driving is really repetitive and it just needed some kind of taxi, service or airplane as it would of been helpful being that everything is really far away similar to the real L.A.

Although playing L.A. Noire was really enjoyable, we felt that the developers could of done a better job at giving more to the gamer. It seems like the team at Rockstar Games only cares about money by selling a lot of DLC and not really making these games the full experience that they should be.

The sad part about it is that a lot of people buy into this and get the game, because it’s created by them. The problem is that as time goes by a publisher or developer you build a reputation and a fanbase that respects and disrespects your work. Rockstar Games is slowly losing it’s cool by continuing to publish crappy games that don’t give much to the gamer.

Do we recommend this game?

I’m not going to propaganda you with that you should buy this game, because I really think it was a waste of my money and that’s my opinion. L.A. Noire is the kind of game that you buy a year or two from now when it’s cheap there’s a dry spell because it will disappoint you. We do however recommend that you rent it because it’s certainly worth that and not the price that it costs.

Our Score

Because of all the things we mentioned in our criticism section of this review and the fact that were disappointed with Rockstar and Team Bondi L.A. Noire gets a 7 out of 10.