I would call this game L.A. Bore. This game is worse then GTA 4 and im not even sure how thats possable. I was so bored playing this game. What good is an open world you can do nothing in. Plus the story is lame.

LA Noire is simply Dragon's Lair for the new Millennium, and I feel for the folk who get suckered into loving "games" like these. LA Noire simply does not have enough interaction, enough repercussions or enough substance on the whole to be anything more than a really boring movie. Also, what little interaction is there in the game is pretty badly done too. The difference between doubting a person's answer and accusing them of lie-ing is often silly, and then it doesn't feel consequential to anyone other than completion-ists; the actual "action" itself feels very linear and very much stuck on a railroad track, the massive LA world contains nothing of note; and the main protagonist is a prick who quickly becomes annoying. There came a point in the game where I was asked to "shadow" a suspect in a cafe - after a few fails the game asked me "would you like to skip this?" - FFS! A key point in the plot and it's treated as if it doesn't matter - it just made things feel cheap and it was as if the game admitted "yeah, this bits a bit crap but we thought we'd chuck it in anyway". Also on the whole the plot seems very disjointed at times and, if you play it out differently to how most would (ie go to a later destination before the obvious one), then the plot often gets a few jumbled up lines thrown in which don't make sense. Other than superb facial animations I really can't see why anyone would be interested in such a pointless game.… Expand

This game was just boring as hell, AS HELL!! I was very disappointed as i was somewhat hyped about this ,but after a good hour worth of gameplay ,I just wanted to go back to my bed and take a nap. This game doesn't even get interesting until the last chapter, but by then you would have most likely given up playing this repetitve mess overall. And there is Absoulutely no build up too the ending, so if you don't pay close attention, you wont know what the hell is going on torwards the end. Rockstar has already proven that a Logo on a box is not a game make with that crappy State of emergency game, so idk why people blame it on Rockstar, Blame the developers. this game was just too overhyped and idk why anyone would even consider buying the DLC for this Just to play more generic, repetitve, boring point and click missions.… Expand

When i first got this i was really excited about it!. But it was one of the biggest disappointments of the year for me!. The graphics are absolutely beautiful, and the way it plays it great! same as the GTA franchis, it was the story that let me down the most. Too say the least i hated it! i have never played a game which has been as repetitive as this one (and i've played Assassins Creed). 1st mission - investigate the crime scene, find evidence, interview some suspects, chase somebody, find out who done it...RINSE AND REPEAT!. This is basically it for each mission throughout the game. 4/10 purely because of the graphics.… Expand

Never in my life have I felt the impulse to return a video game within the first hour of playing it. Where do I start? Yes, the facial rendering technology is amazing. Yes, I realize that L.A. Noire is more a refined, interactive story than a fast-paced video game. I bought the game knowing all these things. However, upon execution, it never lived up to the hype. The "last straw" of my experience was the sluggishness of the controls. They felt slow, burdened, as if the lead character was walking through jelly. All of this is coupled with a repetitive set of investigations that failed to leave any lasting impression. At the end of the day L.A. Noire was a real disappointment.… Expand

I really wish I knew what happened to Rockstar, because GTA3 was as much fun as I've had playing a video game. it's also the last time I nad fun playing a game put out by Rockstar. Their 'games' are technically brilliant. The graphics are outstanding, the sounds are spot on they do a solid job creating environments and mood, but their games don't have the tiniest bit of fun in them.

terrible....just f**king terrible. absolute garbage. You either drive or shoot or question. A linear story tantamount to watching cardboard decay. Everyone loves to hate anything successful (i.e: halo and COD franchise) and yet lord this garbage over our head calling it innovative. Its not innovative, its just lazy and bland. It boils down to an interactive movie experience with a disappointing ending, that will leave you wanting your time and money back.… Expand

More proof that Rockstar needs to stick to GTA and thats it. Never have they made a game even resembling something enjoyable outside of their roaming sandbox super hit and this game only further proves it. The plot is completely disconnected, the gameplay is simple and boring, its literally the most repetitive game ive played so far on the next generation consoles. The characters are annoying beyond belief and whats more is that this game was hailed as amazing when it doesnt even live up to half-ass. Not even worth renting.… Expand

LA Noire is just not a good game. I thought the point of video games was that you could CHOOSE what happens on the screen. This is not progress. You don't actually get to use any skills a detective would use, like deduction, critical thinking or even reflexes. You could get through most of this game blindfolded. The acting is good, but since they are actors they are of course "lying" all the time, eliminating the possibility of actually picking up on involuntary tells or "microexpressions". You will be forced to charge suspects you KNOW to be innocent, because you simply don't get other dialogue options. The game makes (lets?) you kill a lot of people in filler sequences but it is totally detached from the story. And the cars are all the same. Not a good game at all. Respect to the actors and animators though… Expand

The facial movements are excellent, however, that is pretty much all this game brings to the table. It would have been a lot better had it not been so repetitive. Every "chase" is just following a guy until a scripted event happens. Because of that, you never really feel the thrill of the chase, you only end up waiting for it to be over. Also, why is it that everytime you get called to respond to a street crime, you have to drive to the complete opposite side of the map (about 15 minutes of drive time for about 45 seconds of action)? There's nothing fun about that. I'm a huge fan of Red Dead and the whole GTA series but I got bored with this game halfway through and haven't picked it up since.… Expand

The whole point of a video game, or any game, is that you are in control. unlike music, art books or film where you are simply a viewer or listener, a game is interactive. and this is the first problem with LA noir. it is actually a film, which you can fill in the bits that films ignore, such as endless driving with horrible instructions. also in a film or a book you cant skip a secton (Well, you may be able to fast forward) so why in a game do i have to sit through 20 mins of cutscene, which i already watched! when i failed my first interogation, like all gamers i hit restart, and seeming as each case was introduced with a lovely cutscene i though it would go to just before the interogation. no. it ripped me right to the case before and an endless horror of yet more cutscenes.
and seeming as its a game, then many people rate it on graphics. GTA IV looks better. that game was released in 2008! and as for the faces, while they are well animated, they have completely destroyed the eyes that most games get right. what is the point in having a map that is that big, when stuff that is less than 1M away from you looks absolutely horrible.
but why is it a 3 not a 0? well, it is well polished. so far no glitches, and when you can actually see stuff (usiually you have to get real close) it does look very nice, also the way that they "pushed the bat out" with a new genre. but this would have been far more suited for a point and click game. shame really, they put in such effort for a game that is probarbly amazing, to be let down by some moron who dosent under stand the basic concept of games.… Expand

You will totally forget that you are playing a video game! You will totally forget you are having fun! Intrigued?

Okay!

Do you like "Murder She Wrote"? Do you enjoy choose your own adventure books? Do you enjoy watching games instead of playing them? Are you bad at traditional video games? Well if you answered yes you SHOULD definitely buy L.A. Noire, a game that focuses on facial animation, voice acting, and the boring life of a wimpy little detective. It's so fun I forgot I was having any, wait a minute?… Expand

With the logo on the bottom of the box and the extensive hype and advertising you have to wonder what they were boasting about. Okay, the face motion technology is well done and does bring some elements of pleasant suprise but apart from that you really don't have anything else to do. You can play through the whole game and not feel as though you have bought a sandbox, Rockstar game. You are not allowed to pull your gun where and when you want because that is completely up to the game and thee storyline. When you compare this to a game like Red Dead redemption where you could hog tie a nun to the train tracks if you desired this game seems very, very tame and restrictive. You aren't even allowed to run at more than a jog. For a game with such innovative features it seems as though the creators have focused and been swept along with this new technology and forgot about the reason people are really buying this game which is to be a cop in the 40's in L.A. with your own brand of justice ready to be issued but it feels as though you are really no more than a passenger in a story. There really isn't any refreshing elements of the game after 4 hours of gameplay and certainly lacks any desire for dedicating a whole evening to it. Poor effort all in all and seems like a waste of money and a big disappointment from a big company. If I hadn't played a lot of previous Rockstar titles I would be wondering whether I would invest in new games but hopefully they will learn from this mistake and stick to what they know from now on e.g. Red Dead and GTA.… Expand

if you thought gta 4 was repetitive, you're about to get blown out of the water. so, you either drive chase someone, on foot chase someone, have a shootout and do an iterview... now, imagine these are always exactly the same, and now imagine every mission is just these 4 things, over and over and over and over again... well, thats la noire

It has the Rockstar logo on the box, so I was expecting great things. But...It's just...boring.

During one case, I had to chase this bloke who had a shot gun, so I was looking forward to a bit of gun play. He hid behind a wall, so I took cover too. He popped out and I took aim and shot him in the arm. He flopped down dead, action over. Booo!

Car chase sequence. The cars handle just a bit too well. I'm expecting some over steer from a big old American car, but they corner like they're on rails. This caused me to mount the kerb at high speed. Wouldn't have looked good, me a Police detective, smearing some innocents along the pavement. Fortunately for them, they just bounced off the car like they were made of rubber. Boooo!

That's as far as it goes for the good bits.

The rest was the usual:
Wander around looking for clues. Pick things up. Look at them. If it's relevant it goes in the note book. Dull, dull, dull.

Pre-scripted witness/suspect questions and the Truth/Doubt/Lie option following the answer. That gets really boring after the first two Q&A sessions.

Why is this game getting such high scores?
The face animation does look good. But it doesn't make for a good game. It's a gimmick. This is the gaming equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes.… Expand

If you love GTA, then chances are you will not like this game. LA Noire consists mostly of carefully driving yourself from one heavily-scripted, semi-interactive cutscene to the next, and if you don't want to drive you don't even have to do that, you can let your partner do it. The sandbox aspect could be entirely removed from the game and you'd still have the same game. While interacting with the world, you can't jump, you can't run (you can do a brisk trot, but that's it), you can't climb things, hell it won't even let you pull out your gun. This is an extremely restrictive game that completely departs from what we've come to expect from Rockstar.… Expand

Very disappointed with this game especially as I had been looking forward to it for so long. It's not red dead - it lacks the freedom to go and do as you please and removes the moral choices from the game (well u are a cop after all I suppose). It's very repetitive it's the same thing over and over - go to crime pick stuff up go ask a few questions annnd go do it again! The driving feels poor and lacks any real purpose in the grand scheme. The graphics are not the greatest the environment looks quite plain IMO. There are some shocking frame rate drops, the facial animation is good but looks a bit ott at times. Stay well clear if you are looking for the next red dead or gta - my copy has been traded in already - sorry rockstar!… Expand

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The title, on many fronts, is quite a disappointment. It doesn't quite work as a game due to it's restrictive narrative and the way it forces you to do things in a certain way or order and it doesn't quite work as an interactive movie due to the illogicality of many crimes and the shallowness of the characters. To give a view examples: early on in the game you chase someone on a movie set which crumbles under your feet... really? That completely took me out of the detective feel and made me feel like playing Super Mario instead. After the first couple of homicides I figured out who was probably behind all of them, so when the character finally presented himself after doing tons of more of these boring cases, it was no surprise at all. When he said "Do you know who I am?!" as if it was a great mystery I found myself yawning out who he was. The main problem is: you can't go after this character or investigate him further earlier on in the game. You need to continue working all the other cases first. Endlessly trailing a woman who got money from bookies to have her stabbed in the bathroom of a bus station. Of course. Because although everyone is having a really hard time trying to find her, the shooter knew she'd be in that bus station, and especially that she'd be visiting the toilet where he was hiding out, waiting for her. Fortunately, after trailing the woman through all kinds of alleys my partner arrived at the bus station at the same moment I did, as if he had a GPS tracker on me or as if we had contact over the radio. Illogical things like that really turned me off. Another thing that was a big disappointment is the interrogation system. Instead of being able to confront suspects with evidence, you need to listen to them talk and can only confront them if you think they're lying. This I found to be rather restrictive as well. Besides that, whenever you doubt someone or accuse them of lying, Mr Phelps starts to scream and shout at the suspect like some drill sergeant. The over acting get's so bad it feels like watching a Bollywood movie at times. Accepting a call on the radio means you will arrive somewhere, chase someone (by foot or car) and eventually shoot them. I simply stopped doing them after 10 or so simply because it was always the same. The default police cars drive like crap. So get another one you say? There are tons of cooler cars hidden throughout the city, but getting them and driving those instead is a lot of hassle, especially when 9 out of 10 times you will be confronted with the standard car after a cut scene, the car you were driving simply magically disappeared. Almost run someone over during a car chase and you get a big warning on your screen, you're not supposed to do that as a cop! But you can steal any parked car anywhere without it ever being an issue. After playing more than thirteen hours I simply wonder if anyone actually tested this game, whether no one during the testing was bothered by these glitches and illogical things going on and how on earth this game got such high ratings from the 'professional' reviewers. Isn't there any good? Well, not much in my opinion. The graphics? We've seen them all before in the GTA and Mafia series. The revolutionary motionscan technology? Sure, it looks nice but it doesn't make up for all the other flaws with this game. At least you get to spend a lot of time picking up women, hanging in smokey jazz joints, drive around with your roof down while loud jazz music is blurting from your speakers, right? Nope, not even that. If only they'd hired some real detectives to play the game and point out it's flaws, hired people like James Ellroy to help write the scenario and did some proper testing, it might have been a great title.… Expand

Pros: - Great facial motion capture technology - Same control and feel of other GTA games - Good voice acting Cons: - 6 hours in and I still haven't found any fun in the game. - Very short on a variety of game mechanics - Boring play cycle: 1) Play "Where's Waldo" with clues until the music stops. 2) Interview person of interest. 3) Make an arrest (chase). 4) Interrogate and convict. - painfully linear progression through the story with inconsequential radio missions on the side.

Overall, this game is terribly disappointing.

There are so many opportunities for this game to be great that were wasted. The game tracks experience and will "level up" the main character, but none of the improvements make the player's character inherently better at solving crimes, making arrests or interrogation. It feels like an ambitious screen writer wanted to take a crack at bringing the silver screen to the console, but forgot that to be a great console experience requires more than being a film production. Buying a video game is buying fun, in a box, not just a passive entertainment experience. $60 later and I am still searching for the fun and trying to understand why the "professional" metacritic rating is so high while user's are panning the game as mediocre.

Save some money and pass this title.… Expand

I really don't see what all the positive buzz for this game is all about. I have never purchased a game and been so compelled to return it the very next day, and I've been gaming for decades now. I at least played Dragon Age 2 until the 3rd act just in case it did offer something to redeem itself, I couldn't make it that far through this one. I knew what I was getting into when I picked this up, that this would be a new experience and not something like GTA, so people can't use that excuse for why i didn't like this game. What I didn't expect, however, was how mediocre and boring an attempt Team Bondi had crafted. For starters, there are some major issues with this game that most people seem to ignore. Before the game even gets started good I'm hit by crushing drops in frame-rate, and these continue for the entire time I played the game. Weird, because this game doesn't look all that great. Aside from the facial-work (which was fine but looked like actors acting way too hard to convey emotion, it is unique, but to me doesn't look natural), I'd say this game graphically is average at best, Mafia 2, GTA 4, and Red Dead Redemption all look much better. Driving is a hassle. There is no compass or arrow so you have to rely on another worthless Rockstar mini-map or your partner, he's no use however because he never shuts up long enough to give you any assistance. NPC cars drive like maniacs, not following driving laws, they don't stop when they should, they speed and plow into you like you aren't even there, and they end up causing traffic jams that cause you to have to find an alternate route to get where you are going. The handling is also way too twitchy. The gunfights are ridiculous, as any shot an enemy receives is fatal, it is far too simplistic. Chasing criminals on foot is as simple as holding down the run button and pointing the camera where you want to go, the game does all the platforming for you, lame. The rest of the game boils down to being a "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" mini-game (you're given lifelines like "poll the audience" and "remove one answer") wrapped inside a boring point and click adventure. You wander around a crime scene and look for obviously placed evidence, point to which one you want to look at and then relevant info is put into your notepad. Music plays and the controller vibrates when you're near a clue. Wowee! That's revolutionary! Then to the worst part of the game, interrogation. You shift from looking at your notebook and the person you're interviewing and select words, phrases, and evidence. The person reacts, problem is you really can't tell if they're telling the truth or not. They could look like they're lying and be telling the truth and vice versa. You can either believe them, doubt them, or call them a liar. Sometimes if you doubt them they confess something, but if you accuse them flat-out they refuse to answer anymore questions, there really isn't any rhyme or reason to anything they say or do, leading to multiple retries to get the desired result. This leads to the biggest problem with the game, the save feature. I thought games couldn't have a more arbitrary and fun-sapping save feature than those in the Dead Rising series, wrong. There is only one save file, and although there are saves at checkpoints, if you restart, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the case, not where the game auto-saved, pointless. Some of these cases are very long and all of your progress up to the restart point is lost. The game is all about trial and error, and punishes you if you don't get a desired result. Making matters worse is the fact that if you mess up you could miss out on clues for upcoming or connected cases. Why punish the player? I should have the option to retry a section I wasn't happy with without having to start the case all over. There are also long cutscenes you can't skip through. On top of all this the story is disjointed and boring, there are plenty of poor attempts at humor, and I didn't particularly like any of the characters either. This game is an almost-broken, repetitious mess. I will be staying away from Team Bondi's future attempts like the plague. I'm all for new experiences, they do need to be fun though. Heck, Heavy Rain was one big quick-time event, but at least it was fun and had a good story.… Expand

This game has good acting, but it's really not my taste. I like a little action in my games, and design that isn't so static. I guess I'm just not into this genre in games. I'd rather watch a good crime movie and play something with teeth. Can't wait for the next Gears. :)

Solid game play. Best game out now. If you only could play 5 games this year, this should be one of them. Must love it. The story, the graphic and the acting.