L.A. Noire Review

When searching the ransacked apartment of a man suspected of rape, Detective Cole Phelps is able to pick up and examine a scale model replica of the set of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film, Intolerance. The set itself, a recreation of the Great Wall of Babylon that was torn down a few years after the film was shot, still exists in L.A. Noire’s alternate history late 1940s Los Angeles. That set is empty, of course, save for the two occasions for which it’s required as a backdrop for the purposes of the game’s story, but you can drive to it, get out and explore it whenever you wish. There’s nothing to do there, and no point to it being there, really.

The Los Angeles of L.A. Noire can be seen as a film set. It’s a backdrop – albeit a painstakingly authentic one – to the drama unfolding elsewhere. The curiously anachronistic Intolerance set stands as a grandiose monument to Team Bondi’s equally extravagant creative vision. In that apartment, as Phelps examines that replica, it’s as mute and lifeless as any stage prop. “A replica of a replica,” he says.

The open world that Phelps is able to explore provides very few reasons to explore it. Centred around the Downtown area and stretching a few miles to the industrial east and a few more across the new housing sprawl to the west and further north to the more glamorous (read: seedy) Sunset Strip, it’s a sizeable yet shallow expanse. Buildings, shops and houses may only be entered and interacted with when a case takes Phelps there and there’s a reason to speak with someone. Side missions, called out by dispatch, occur at random and urge Phelps and his partner to chase down a crook or shoot a bunch of crooks. A handful of collectibles – cars, newspapers and film reels – can also be found. It’s as if someone has taken a pillow to the face of GTA’s living, breathing world.

But L.A. Noire isn’t trying to be GTA. It’s an open world but not a sandbox. It may be a continuous, non-linear space but you aren’t free to do whatever you like within it. Some critics have suggested that the open world is redundant, that L.A. Noire would be a stronger experience if the story beats segued from police station to crime scene and so on without all the pointless driving around in between. I feel this is missing the point.

Team Bondi has created a seamless, coherent and vast stage on which to tell their story – and it is very much their story, not yours. The slow burn telling of this story eventually reveals Los Angeles itself to be the main character, a conceit that wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful if that city didn’t exist at all times.