As we found out, it's a game best played on nights where you haven't just spent two days in airports with little sleep! The End If you misread someone, it can change the whole way a case is played out. For those characters that are difficult to read, interrogations require close attention and an enormous amount of concentration. For some characters, it's obvious if they are holding information, while for other characters it's not so easy. Each character you interview has their own personality, and you must read their expressions carefully to decide if they are telling the truth, holding back information, or outright lying. Noire utilizes a facial capture system called MotionScan to ensure the experience feels real. Interrogation is central to the gameplay, and L.A. Disabling the options makes the game rather difficult, especially, for instance, in one case we played, where the crime scene was a hideously cluttered house with hundreds of scattered items, the majority of which were irrelevant to the crime. There are audio and controller cues which draw the player's attention to clues at places of interest, however these can be disabled via the options menu. If you're a fan of old cars, playing with these will be worth the price of admission on their own.įurthermore, those concerned that the game will be too easy (based on what they may have read in other previews) need not worry. Being that the game is set in the late '40s, they're obviously all classics, and it's readily apparent that lots of care went into modeling the fancy chrome trim and sweeping body lines which were more common at the time.
We're not sure how many cars there are, but we saw a lot of them. From the clothing and cars, down to the film noir slang, the research that went into this project must have been an enormous undertaking. All in all, the game does a spectacular job recreating a city which was still growing at the time. Likewise, the hotel we were staying at was represented perfectly. As before, our historic knowledge of the city is a bit limited, but the major roads and landmarks we expected to see were there.
Not only is it big, but the sheer number of streets and alleys in the city is far beyond that found in any GTA to date. Noire is very much focused on the individual cases and crime scenes, with the map, in effect, providing a context to those cases.Īt about 8 square miles, and covering an area from around the LA River to West Hollywood, there is a lot to see and take in. In GTA and Red Dead, the map is arguably the most important component of the game, and is central as far as the action is concerned.
LA NOIRE MOVIE
Granted, there is still plenty of action which will make fans of Rockstar's other games feel right at home (our favorite in the early part of the game was an epic chase through an old movie set) but these are well balanced with things like the interrogations and such which require much more thinking. Noire feels more mature than any other Rockstar title we've played, both in terms of the style of action and the content that is presented.įundamentally, it's very different, and the only similarities are the combat/cover systems, the fact it is an open-world, and the basic driving mechanics.
It's been said before, but we'll say it again – this is not a Grand Theft Auto or a Red Dead Redemption-style game.