The game's pacing and narrative arc impress as much as its believability. Luckily, LA Noire is pretty forgiving, so if your body language-assessment skills aren't up to CSI standards, you should still get the right result in the end, although you risk a chewing-out from your boss for shoddy police work, which is genuinely mortifying. If you don't adopt the correct tone, the character you're quizzing will, at the very least, take longer to give you the crucial information you seek.Īs you rise through the ranks, you earn Intuition points, which can be cashed in to eliminate one wrong question-tone (or reveal the location of all the clues at a location). If you accuse a suspect of lying, you must back that up by producing evidence (all accessed, along with along with your records of each case and details of suspects from your standard cop's notebook). These are marked Truth, Doubt and Lying, but Sympathetic, Dubious and Accusatory would perhaps be more rigorous.
You have to analyse facial responses and bodily tics like a poker-player seeking tells, then choose one of three tones to adopt for each question. It's when you question suspects and witnesses that things get interesting. Thus, you have to drive to crime scenes, root around for clues and examine bodies, then follow the resulting leads. Essentially, it sees you playing through Phelps's working life, doing what you imagine a real-life LAPD detective would have done in 1947. LA Noire's gameplay capitalises cleverly on this breakthrough technology. The familiar need to suspend disbelief has been all but eliminated. Couple that with the obsessive attention to detail for which Rockstar's existing games such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are famed, and the end result rings true to a greater extent than anything that has gone before.