#La noire review drivers#
But the drivers of 1940s Los Angeles are apparently all psychotic, blind, and drunk. You’ll be doing a lot of driving in this game, and while you can opt to have your partner drive (effectively warping to the location), it’s nice to actually get to know the city a bit and admire the world that Bondi Studios has so lovingly created. The writing and cases are solid, and while there are a few tropes resorted to here and there (the boozing, religious captain at Central comes to mind), LA Noire consistently bats above the gaming average on dialogue, plotting, and so on. How many times did I hear the same guy yell “I say we bust in there and get the goddamn evidence” as I exited the briefing room? With so many lines of spoken dialogue, it would not have been amiss to record a few more atmospheric ones. They suffer from line repetition syndrome, even in the police station where you start your case. That said, the generic NPCs could have used a little more sprucing up. With a few minor exceptions, every character in the game sounds distinct and real, and there’s enough variation in the writing that they don’t seem like generic NPCs numbers one through five hundred. It helps that the sound design is impeccable, with authentic music, great-sounding cars, and excellent voice acting.
It’s also easy to begin to like some people and dislike others - the friendly coroner, for example, was always a welcome face. Surprisingly, your own character is one of the least memorable, perhaps because his face is rather unremarkable to begin with (apologies to Aaron Staton). In particular, an old lady at a bowling alley, directing me to a person of interest, and one of the many bartenders I met while investigating, both struck me as so much like real people that they escaped uncanny valley.
Some characters are rendered more convincingly than others, but with a few I found myself shaking my head at how amazingly lifelike they were. Homes and businesses are filled with details and false clues for you to discover, and the overall “feel” of the city is very effective.Īs you’ve no doubt read, the biggest technical advance in the game is the expression system, specifically the movement of faces, and I would say that it’s absolutely as good as they have said. There are dozens of cars to unlock, as well as landmarks worth checking out while on or off the case.