LA Noire - Remastered PS4

[HabsTown]

Hi guys,

Might be looking to buy LA Noire but heard/read complete opposite reviews about it (game of the decade or boring as hell).

I searched the forum to read a review but couldn’t find one. I’m looking for some opinions from the ones that played the game.

Thanks in advance!

Click to read more...

 

[Chaels Arms]

If you are a story driven gamer like me then I think you will definitely like it. I've played it a couple of times now. The story and the voice acting are great. The gameplay and the "open world" are bland and boring especially when compared with some of the games that have been released since then.

 

[542365]

If you are a story driven gamer like me then I think you will definitely like it. I've played it a couple of times now. The story and the voice acting are great. The gameplay and the "open world" are bland and boring especially when compared with some of the games that have been released since then.

I was coming to post almost the exact same thing. The story/detective work is fun, but the “action” is pretty boring. I definitely think it’s worth playing, but not incredible by any means.

 

[kingsboy11]

Personally loved it when I played it all those years ago. I love this era in the mid 40s and I think it has a clever story and game mechanics. I have seen the concerns about the open world being rather bland in some aspects. But for me at least as someone who lives in LA, I thought it was awesome seeing some of the places that I've been to in real life and then seeing it in the game made it special.

 

[Albatros]

I only played the original, but at least based on it I can only agree. Some of the missions are good fun, and the setting has its charm, but at the same time the open world in itself is not very immersive and after the first hour or so you probably won't end up spending much more time exploring it than is necessary to navigate through the storyline.

If you can find a good deal I can recommend the game as it is, dated and flawed to begin with, but also just enough fun to make it worth playing through the missions.

 

[hangman005]

I did enjoy the game, and it's shame the open world was lacking for things to do. It's a game I wouldn't mind have seeing a 2nd game, maybe different location, and more to it.... pity it was by all accounts such a nightmare for those at bondi.

 

[Ceremony]

Here is half a review I posted of it in 2014:

I haven't "finished" finished this yet and I had been debating how to put together my summation of it in here so I decided to do it in two parts, first here where I only focus on the game itself and then later where I can do the full story and more about its place in gaming.

Basic things: Driving is dreadful. Maybe it's because I'm alternating this with GTAV but the cars, my god. I remember thinking that the steering could be summed up as having the car go in "directions" (ie forward, left or right) and that's pretty much it. Occasionally if you go round a corner quickly and violently enough you get what is probably supposed to be a slide, though all this does is highlight how bad the driving mechanics are. In addition, what is probably the worst vehicle/pedestrian AI since PS1 days makes it a far more stressful experience than it should be. Imagine the thought processes. "A car is driving towards me much faster than usual, with a siren blaring. I will immediately run out into the road in its path, then stop, then start to run back." Brilliant. Or the motorists, "I'm coming up to a junction and I can hear a siren, so I'll drive out then stop directly in front of a lane." Maybe they were going for a "cars are new so people don't know how to act around them" angle, but it's just so bad. Fortunately you can skip the driving parts, but being able to skip things which are bad isn't a good piece of game design.

Speaking of being able to skip things that are bad, something that doesn't seem to be balanced very well is the switching between the main gameplay mechanics of the interviewing/evidence hunting and virtually anything besides that. The driving is bad as I covered, the shooting segments aren't much better. There's no ammo counter, and although there's a range of weapons there doesn't seem to be much variation in their range/effectiveness. Aiming is annoying too. And juxtaposing these sections with the normal parts, it just seems off. Hand to hand combat sections amount to little more than fights from an NHL game. The same goes for virtually every on-foot section. There's what can best be described as a platforming section when you're climbing some scaffolding outside a building, it just seems to really not fit with anything else in the game. Especially annoying are bits where you have to walk along a plank or a narrow platform, where he goes far too slowly and is apparently unable to keep his balance. It just feels... off.

Still in the world of "off" and things which don't seem very consistent, I can't agree with Oscar above about the look of the game. The facial graphics are obviously brilliant and revolutionary, but everything else suffers. You watch a cutscene, you see a face with all its expressions and stuff, then the shot cuts to behind the speaker and you see the back of their neck and their hair and it looks like someone in the crowd from NHL 2007. The environments are similar in some sections, things like walking/running/jumping animations look really jerky and cartoony and while it's not game ruining and understandable, if they were to remake this in about ten years I think the whole thing could look much better. It's not really a complaint, just something you can't get past given the generation it was released in and the limitations of the hardware.

It's over three years since I first played this and I forgot how frustrating interviews and interrogations can be. Having truth/doubt/lie isn't much use when you don't know what sort of response Cole is going to have to that. It says to pick doubt if you think someone is telling the truth but has more information they can give you, but sometimes you pick doubt and he can be coaxing and get something out gently, then others he starts yelling and threatening them with jail and god knows what else. The piano noise from a wrong option is by far the most unenjoyable thing about the game, every time you hear it you know you've ****ed up and there's nothing you can do about it. One of the arson cases where it comes down to two guys you're interrogating, I knew full well which of them I should have been charging, but because I picked the wrong questions I couldn't. There's flaws in this style of gameplay, though I don't know what else they could have done to really get round it.

I think I'll leave that there before I start going into things that aren't strictly about the game and say, good game. Will hopefully remain important in making games something beyond pure escapism.

It's a fantastic period recreation with a story and gameplay basis that sort of limit each other in terms of how the story progresses and how much agency the player has in controlling Phelps throughout. If you're interested in games it's an interesting take on the open world and a more procedural interactive narrative. If you're interested in the 1940s and noir detective fiction you can't exactly avoid it. I'd say it's worth playing regardless of your feelings on any of these subjects. I've only played the PS3 version though, I don't know how the PS4 version plays.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

With zero replay-ability afterwards and a complete dogshit ending. Yeah I’d save my $ honestly.

I bought the original when it came out for the PS3. It looked great (especially for its time) but that’s about it.

 

[Jovavic]

I'll echo the others, it's a fun game if you know what you're getting and don't mind the weak areas. I thought the good outweighed the bad by a fair amount so I ended up enjoying it, and it's been so long since I've played it I've thought about getting the ps4 version if I see it for cheap as I've probably forgotten most if the cases lol

 

[Hammettf2b]

the motion capture for this game is the best there is ever imo. The facial expressions and mouth look damn good.

 

[Big McLargehuge]

A game that seemed to be made for me that just...yawn.

I should have loved that game, and because I didn't I instead despise it despite it being merely a 7/10 instead of the 9/10 I craved. Problem is I'd rather watch almost any film noir than play a long 7/10 game with awful action segments and clunky mechanics...and if you've seen a single film noir film then you can pretty much guess every single twist coming, so the story isn't going to keep you coming back (note: I was actually taking a couple courses on film noir around the time the game came out, so they were pretty much all fresh in my head at the time and I must have been insufferable about it).

And now I'm angry again that there's a game set in film noir-era LA that I don't adore every aspect of. LA Confidential in game form was basically my dream game. Feh.

 

[HabsTown]

Thank you guys for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

 

[Hatfield]

I didn’t even realize this had been remastered. Wish they’d do that for RDR1.

 

[NyQuil]

I liked the game although I found the interrogation sequences to be a lot of trial and error.