This is straight up one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life. Anyone feel like talking about it? It’s seven years old at this point, which is very old in video game years, but it holds up really, really well and I think it will continue to do so forever. The faces look amazing, the clothes, the cars, the whole period piece setting - phenomenal world-building and immersion.
You know what I’d love? A sequel to this game, with the same gameplay, but set in 1970s New York!!
I remember enjoying the game until I had to drive somewhere. It lost all its luster after that.
Why? Did you not like the big, clunky cars? There are hidden cars throughout the game (actually rather easy to find) that are much faster and more fun to drive than the typical cars. They’re marked by a question-mark symbol on the map.
Also, you can make your partner drive you, rather than having to do it yourself, by holding down the triangle button when you’re next to a car. There are some car chase segments where it’s mandatory that you drive, but just for going from crime scene to crime scene, you can make the AI do it.
I love LA Noire.
There is now an HD updated version for the PS4. I’ve been thinking about picking it up.
I love what I call the Rockstar Trilogy. LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption and GTA V. They simply make the best games in my opinion. The faces in GTA V are even better than LA Noire in my opinion, but LA Noire is a fine game in its own right. If you like period-specific games, you should really check out Red Dead Redemption. It really immerses you in the old west, much like LA Noire does with 40s LA.
I doubt they would do an LA Noire type game with NYC in the 70s, but I would sure buy it since I grew up in NY in the 70s. 
Sometimes when I feel homesick, I play GTA IV which is set in NYC and put my 70s music playlist on. Brings me right back to the era.
I enjoyed the game a lot (despite the aforementioned sloppy driving mechanics) but there’s essentially zero replay value once you’ve done all the in-game and DLC cases, so I think it will only “hold up” for people who’ve never played it before.
I loved Red Dead Redemption, and the upcoming prequel will (probably) provide the nudge I need to finally buy an Xbone.
There’s a shortened VR version that I’ve seen a few YouTubers playing lately.
I loved how LA Noire used both voices and likenesses of actors, so I felt like I was in a period cop show. I really dig that game.
Man, it’s been a while. Here’s everything I remember about this highly unusual title:
What drew me to it was the idea of a PS3 game where I could get all the trophies. Having suffered through Dynasty Warriors Gundam, Dynasty Warriors 6, BlazBlue, Facebreaker, the first Assassin’s Creed, and Time Crisis 4, among others, the appeal of a game where I could proceed at my own pace and ultimately dominate every aspect was almost overwhelming. Aside from that, the reviews made this sound like a game which rewarded intelligence and reasoning skills and not insanely fast reflexes or memorizing page after page of moves. And the fact that there was no online multiplayer, something which the very thought of makes me retch nowadays, was another plus. This was one of the very few games I got post-PS2 that sounded like it would be really, really good and I was excited about getting.
And then I started actually playing it. I was never good at solving mysteries, not even at the Donald J. Sobol level, and found that getting the responses right was a helluva lot more trial-and-error than any damn facial expression reading. Searching for clues was a mixed bag; for some cases it progressed logically and it wasn’t hard to pick up everything, for others it was a very tedious slog through a very large haystack for some amazingly obscure needles. Honestly, I would’ve appreciated a more streamlined interrogation system where you either have or don’t have hard evidence proving a lie, and if you don’t you just continue pressing for information without any “truth” or “doubt” posturing (it doesn’t help that the number of correct responses almost never has any effect on how the case proceeds). In all, the detective aspect wasn’t as cool as expectations and definitely wasn’t very satisfying.
Tailing someone without being detected has always been one of the worst tasks in every game that’s had it (by far the most aggravating part of the otherwise stellar Assassin’s Creed 2), and I was pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case here. It’s easy to be invisible if you’re careful and don’t make any foolish moves. In fact, the trophy where I have to tail a suspect without using any hiding places was one of the easiest to get.
Firefights, while a bit too challenging for my liking, never got outrageously difficult. I really liked that there was an option to skip them after repeated failures, an indication of a company that had its priorities in order. The flamethrower was pretty cool and I just wished I could have use it more often.
Chase scenes were…well…not my cup of tea at all. Whatever video game reflexes I had withered into oblivion via a combination of Codebreakers and just plain not giving a rip, with the result that fleeing suspects kept slipping just out of reach again…and again…and again…and again…and again. Fortunately, there was a hard limit to how far they could run, after which, provided they hadn’t lost me, I’d automatically nab them. I’m certain Rockstar made a lot of enemies among the hyper-hardcore crowd by treating this as a GAME as opposed to an exercise in grunting, sweating manhood, and I have to applaud them for sticking to their guns.
Driving…eh, wasn’t a fan, but at least I wasn’t constantly murdering cars like in the Grand Theft Auto games. The biggest challenge was keeping the damage low enough that it didn’t ding my star level for the case, and with practice that became a piece of cake.
Didn’t get that the hero can abet a suspect’s escape and commit a half-dozen similar questionable actions, and what ruins his reputation as a detective is cheating on his wife (who barely shows up at all, BTW).
As disgusting video game chain-yanking shenanigans go, being given a choice of two suspects to arrest, one who has pretty powerful evidence against him and all but confessed to the crime moments ago and a second whom the case against isn’t that good but who is a child molester, choosing the first (which a detective with any sense of professional integrity would do), and getting BLASTED for it, and then finding out later that neither man was guilty so the choice didn’t even matter, was INFINITELY worse than finding out that the events of Super Mario Bros. 2 were a dream.
By far my most unpleasant experience was the time I had to catch up to a bus. The route was clearly marked out, and a typical bus isn’t that fast and needs to make stops, so I figured it wouldn’t take that long. One minute passed. Two. Three. The hero and his partner got increasingly frustrated. Four minutes. Five. Hero and partner close to losing it. More time passed; still no bus. This was getting ridiculous. Finally, finally the partner had a sudden revelation: “Hey, I think we’re going the wrong way!” I restarted the sequence, did an immediate U-Turn, and ran the route the opposite way I did before, and lo and behold, there was the bus. Aaaarrrrghhh!! You were THIS CLOSE to making a horrible unbelievable BS-free game, Rockstar!
Why I stopped playing: It reached the point were none of the remaining trophies were worth the trouble. I got the (rather pedestrian) ending, I got five stars on every case, I found all the clues, I did a no-hiding-place tail, I fired a warning shot, and so on. So let’s see what’s left. Complete a case after racking up at least $47,000 in damages! Sounds unbelievably boring. Breaking 5,000 objects in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was tedious enough, and that was an all-time mark. Find and drive every vehicle! Many of which need to be commandeered while being driven, and oh joy, I get to play “breeze through the first 90% and then spend weeks searching blindly for the last two or three things” again. Find all the gold reels! Ooh, giant scavenger hunt, I can’t begin to tell you what a delight that isn’t. Find all the landmarks! Refer to previous statement. Drive over 194.7 miles! Sure, take the most tiresome part of the game and stretch it way out, why don’t you? Complete all the street cases! Okay, maybe this could’ve been fun if I gave it a chance, but I’m fairly confident that the same cover-headshot-cover-headshot dance over and over is going to get pret-ty dull before too long.
On the whole, this was a solid effort, one of the better offerings for the PS3, and definitely worth the price. It did a great job of capturing the atmosphere of the post-World War 2 era, it had a genuinely intriguing plot, and the gameplay was both intuitive and forgiving. Ultimately, though, there was simply too little substance and too many flaws to consider this one of the seventh-generation greats. If Rockstar later expanded on the basic premise or created sequels in different locations and time periods (Prohibition-era Chicago was one I saw suggested several times), I’d probably remember it more fondly.
I played it about 2 years ago. It was already 5 years old at the time.
I liked it a lot and I really appreciated the amount on content it came with.
One of the main features was that you were supposed to read people’s faces and figure out if they were lying. Once I got mid-way in the game, though, I honestly had a hard time doing this. My wife and I found we were doing our best, but basically guessing our way through things.
Still, the story was great, the action scenes were a lot of fun, and it was not impossibly difficult. I beat the main game and all DLC(my copy was $5 for game + dlc).
Worth it.
I played it on Xbox360 a few years after it came out, phenomenal game, I will play the version on Xbox one again for the story and the bonus GS I suppose. It was a really good game! I rank it up there with Fallout 3 + New Vegas and Bioshock 1-2-Infinite as my favorites.
I liked it overall, warts and all ; but I was always a bit annoyed at the protagonist’s dialogue and how it’s handled - the whole “truth/doubt/lie” rather than giving me an inkling of what precisely it’s going to have Cole say. There are a few conversations I remember where Cole is calmly listening (and I with him), I note a detail I figured was a little off or catch what I think is a visual cue (without it clashing directly against a clue), so I go “doubt” and suddenly Cole is like “OF COURSE YOU KILLED HIM, DIDN’T YOU YOU STUPID WHORE ?!” and I’m like “Jesus calm the hell down dude, she just had a weird lip curl !”. Quite jarring. Cole has issues :).
I liked some of the twists - like how you actually meet the serial killer a long, long time before you can figure who he is and pretty much hated the last few scenes. A flamethrower chase, a sewer AND an action movie flooding tunnel ? Jeez, when did my quiet police procedural turn into Die Hard ? Plus I’m not sure that’s how a noir game should have ended, didn’t noir films typically end on dissatisfaction and ambiguity rather than neatly tying all the loose ends ? “The stuff dreams are made of”, that kind of thing ?
I found it pretty clever myself. Re: the getting blasted, your boss does tell you pretty heavy handedly “hey, I want you to nab that guy, find a way to do it”, so he’s predictably angry when you don’t since the boss quite obviously has issues ; plus IIRC that’s one of the first real tells that the whole department is a bit… off. Which as I understand it is pretty much how it was back in the day, pinning shit on “undesirables” included. As for it not mattering, well, it does, since the real killer never sees the inside of a courthouse and every previous conviction presumably sticks regardless of the innocence of the “guilty” because the truth doesn’t end up coming out. If anything, it doubles down on railroading the pedophile/fucking over the innocent. Maybe the guys you nabbed before will quietly be let go at their first parole hearing, or maybe they’ll just get buried in the cracks they fell through…
SO glad to see this thread got some traction!
I just started a (third!) re-watch of The Wire and my God, how I would love for Rockstar to make a game with the same gameplay mechanisms as L.A. Noire, but set in a setting like The Wire, with the same quality of acting. Incorporating the same searching-for-clues and interrogation stages, but also incorporating surveillance and including information gleaned from wiretaps and covert photography into the clues that can be used to interrogate the witnesses and suspects. MY GOD THIS WOULD BE AWESOME!
I just referred to the player character as “Ken Cosgrove”, despite his official name in the game. This extended to yelling at him when I fucked something up like failing to catch up to a suspect in a chase or making a dumb move during a fight (including the rather frustrating fistfights that you always wind up in.) “Goddammit Cosgrove, you son of a bitch!”
There are some other Mad Men actors in the game too. I think the guys who played Pete Campbell and Paul Kinsey showed up at some point. Also, the British boxer was voiced by the same guy who did the voice of Mark Hammond from the great underrated PS2 gangster game The Getaway, which was in many ways a precursor to LA Noire.
I only recently [binge] watched Mad Men and immediately noticed 3 or 4 crossovers! A quick google search led me to this!
The title of the article is: Did You Know That As Many As 75 ‘Mad Men’ Characters Were Mo-Capped Into The Video Game ‘L.A. Noire’?