Brad’s Backlog – L.A. Noire

I have to be honest here. I did not enjoy this game. Now before you rage quite on me just hear me out, be warned, there will be spoilers!

This game was close to becoming the Bane to my Batman – that is to say that this is the title that almost broke me.  I was so close to just giving up, using a walkthrough or even worse – lying! You see I made a terrible mistake with L.A. Noire in thinking that if I took a week out from reality I could just sit down and get it done. Oh how wrong I was!

It seems that each case, of which there are many, follows only one of a few options as it unfolds. there will be either a chase up onto the roof tops of L.A, a tedious car chase, an incredibly frustrating tailing of a suspect or a rather cumbersome and awkward shoot out. Now this would be fine if you were to play maybe a case or two at a time. The excellent story would more than make up for this rinse and repeat style of game play. But I didn’t do that. I played case after case back to back and as a result grew more and more frustrated at the repetition.

To make matters worse the AI is painfully dumb at times. In fact it is so dumb it can make even Katie Price sound intelligent! Below is a picture of a suspect who crashed his car into a central reservation causing both his front wheels to pop off. This meant he had not been disabled by my actions nor had he escaped. The end result was a suspect refusing to get out of the car and no way to end the action sequence! If this was real life America he would have simply been shot in the face – despite his light tone of skin…

If the idiotic AI mixed with the repetitive nature of the action sequences wasn’t enough to make me want to go and talk over the current socio-economic state of France with Jordan (not the place, the dumb stripper) the plot would soon finish me off. It seemed to me that all I did was put the wrong people in prison while the real culprits, who were very well know to me, kept either getting away with it or being killed by people other than me. No one appeared to face any real justice for the distribution of the morphine I had been tracking all game. All of the dirty cops appeared to keep their jobs, the guy setting all of the fires was shot in the face (and not by me!) – and to top it all off you die at the end!

It is safe to say that this is not one I will be playing again. Yes I admit that had I taken the time to play it over a longer period I may well have enjoyed it more. But it is over now, and I am glad.