Gaming LA Noire PC Review

I got this for Xbox 360 when it came out. I thought it was OK, but there are some major problems with it, which were mentioned in the review.

1. It's often hard to guess what the game thinks is the "correct" action or response. And when there are two equally valid options, you really can do nothing more than guess.

2. There are no consequences to your actions. It doesn't seem to matter how well you do or how badly - you always progress to the next case, and your career goes up and down regardless of your performance.

3. There's virtually no intelligence required when gathering or using clues. It doesn't ask you to think of people worth talking to or to interpret clues. It just hands it all to you on a plate. There is one high point half way through the game which requires you to solve cryptic clues left behind by a serial killer - it actually gave me a reason to engage my brain, which was good, but it made me realise how poor the rest of the investigation work was in comparison.

Another problem, but less of an issue for gameplay, is that the story leaves several loose ends and unresolved conflicts, which is frustrating for such a story heavy game.

I think the 60% review score here is about right.

 

They should release Red Dead Redemption for pc

 

I agree with the score. Not played it on PC yet, but it's a fairer analysis of the game I played on the PS3.

Yes, it's very different to what's around at the moment. And yes, it's great to have something more than button mashing to a game. But it's not really all that fun. I reckon Rockstar appreciated that, because there are so many gratuitous shoot-out scenes that feel more GTA than LA Noire.

If the game was about collecting evidence and building up cases I think I would enjoy it more.

In reality though, it just becomes a combination of box-ticking and guesswork. You walk around the scene button mashing until you collect every piece of evidence, much of which is just a complete lottery, since it's pretty difficult to see what's out of place, and then if you're lucky a noise comes through to tell you you're done. Otherwise you wander around until you're bored and accept you won't find the rest of the evidence.

Then you go and find a witness, perhaps unintentionally, who in my mind rarely gives an interpretable indication of whether they're lying or not, and then you're meant to challenge them about their lies. Another lottery. Oh, you didn't want to challenge that witness yet because you have absolutely no evidence to show that they're wrong? Well too bad. You have no choice. And you didn't notice that they looked left 4.5 seconds in, and thus failed to challenge their otherwise quite convincing story? Unlucky, you lose.

It's a game that needs to give you far more freedom, but freedom is obviously hard to code and hard to give players a good chance of success. What you've got instead is an awkward combination of freedom to explore and narrow scope for investigation, that in my eyes is little better than the CSI games that have been pumped out over the last few years.

 

It is a console port. Runs fine on Quad Core CPU's.

 

You must have hated Heavy Rain on consoles then..

 

It's people like you that make companies remake old movies into action movies... And ruin them.

I won't argue those were bad, but that wasn't why.

 

I wondered how it could be rated so low but after playing... WTH was Rockstar thinking.

I want to like it, the city is awesome, growing up in Southern California, it's neat to see places I have actually been, but the rest of the game feels like an extremely cheap port.

It's like one of those $10 knockoff games you buy at stores. I got the impression someone took GTA 3, added a good artist and then added a choose your own adventure system to it. The controls are some of the worst I have seen, as is the actual gameplay. Why give me control to walk 2 meters? That's just annoying.

Rockstar really dropped the ball on this, it could have been great.