"Look, it's that cop that solved the big case!"

Much like my experience with Aliens Vs Predator this phrase, or variations on it, haunted me throughout my time with LA Noire. The non-playable characters that populate the world only say a few things, but they say them so often that it gets tiresome. Just write some more lines for crying out loud! In the credits there were about sixty people listed as doing incidental pedestrian voice work. Make it seem like that!

It’s hard to believe that every third person in LA would loudly comment on the sight of a plain clothed police officer, let alone recognise him in the first place. This city is overpopulated by men with hats that are too big for their heads, on heads that are too big for their bodies, so how would they pick him out of that crowd?

Team Bondi were obviously faced with a conundrum. They had great facial animation that would lose its impact if reduced beyond a certain size. Do they make the characters’ heads smaller to fit the standard Rockstar protagonist body size, thereby compromising what was a major selling point of the game? Or do they make their bodies larger and more properly proportioned, but then not have them fit properly into the frame?

They opted to put big bobble heads on tiny, no neck, poorly motion captured bodies. It’s a difficult decision, and I can see why they chose the faces over the bodies, but you look at it at times and wonder if there’s any point in having this wonderful facial detail if you’re dumping it on top of a third rate body, and then plopping on a hat that juts out about four inches too far off the back of their head.

The game’s graphical inconsistencies are matched only by the developer’s inability to properly integrate story and gameplay. One would imagine that the thrill behind playing this sort of detective game would come from using a combination of evidence, keen observation, and masterful interrogation to correctly determine the murderer, arsonist, etc. You’d feel fulfilled from locking up the bad guy. Unfortunately nearly every person you accuse, charge, and put away is later revealed to be innocent. Of course, to make matters worse you knew this all along.

There’s no satisfaction here, no sense of accomplishment. You close a case, yet you know you’ve done the wrong thing. That’s not a rewarding experience. The player’s enjoyment is undermined by the story that the game is trying to tell, a story which isn’t nearly that great, nor clever. In fact it's practically the same story as Hot Fuzz, minus the fat monkey jokes and Point Break references. It’s even got its own version of the bloke that says “Yarp.”

It may sound like I hate this game, I don’t, it was just a disappointing, exasperating experience overall. I think it’s because I was really looking forward to it. I fed into the hype and imagined this was going to be something that it wasn’t. I suppose you could say I’m partly to blame.

I blame Brendan McNamara who wrote and directed the stupid thing.

One day someone will make a really great detective game where you’ll come away feeling like you’ve made a difference. I didn’t feel like I’d cleaned up the streets. I felt like I’d harassed and intimidated a lot of innocent people and grieving husbands. I felt cheated and frustrated. I came away feeling like I’d been played.