I won't comment concretely on the quality of the game just yet because I'm still pretty early on in the story I think but there's something quite annoying about this game that really stands out in a game about being a detective. You may think that the goal of this game is to use clues and information to work out who did whatever crime your working on but that's not really true. Your job as the player is to work out what the hell Cole, the main character, is thinking and make sure that the answers you give to a situation match what's going through his mind.
For example, there's a case very early on where you find a car crashed an abandoned in a train yard. The car is full of blood but there's no body. In the trunk of the car you find a receipt for the sale of a live pig and by the car you find a bloody pipe and a dropped wallet with, what you assume, is the victims address. So fine, maybe its a murder or maybe something else is going on. The next step of this case is to go to the victims house and tell the wife that her husband has been killed...
Now hold on there, Cole
There's no fucking body, I don't KNOW that the husband is dead. It MIGHT be the victims blood, it MIGHT be someone else's blood or, for all we know, it might be pigs blood. But no, because Cole thinks the man is dead, I'm not allowed to explore any other avenue, I HAVE to go to the house and tell the wife her husband is dead. When exploring the house you find evidence of an unhappy marriage, separate bedrooms, train tickets to Seattle and, most damning, a missing pipe from a boiler outside the house that matches the pipe at the scene. The wife seems to cooperate and tells you about a shifty friend of the victim. If the guy is dead, this guy might have something to do with it, so down to a bar to go find him and ask him a few questions.
So you get to the bar, ask the guy some stuff and find out that while on trips to Seattle he's fallen in love with another woman and this guy used the pig to "help him out"
OH OK! I GET IT! This guy crashed a car and bludgeoned the live pig in order to fake this dudes death so that he can escape to Seattle and spend his time with his new lover. So Cole asks the obvious question of where is this guy, and in response you get a sort of roundabout answer where's like "I can't say my hands are tied". When I pressed the Doubt button on this dialogue, Cole immediately gets mad and starts accusing the guy of bloody murder. Me as the player meanwhile am facepalming at my monitor screaming "No Cole you fucking idiot, he killed the Pig, we just want the location of the guy, HES NOT FUCKING DEAD"
This sequence ends and you tail the guy to his apartment, find him with the "victim" and then make your arrest and beat the chapter. Yeah great, but I was penalized at multiple points during the case because my train of logic of the guy not being dead didn't match with Coles' logic of there being a murder. It's annoying when you get told your wrong during the investigation because your logic doesn't match the game, only to be COMPLETELY CORRECT come the conclusion. It's an irritating disconnect between character and player and it's exasperated by the fact that the only options you get during an interrogation are Truth, Doubt and Lie and the difference between Doubt and Lie is pretty fucking abstract.
This isn't a problem exclusive to L.A. Noire. Personally I find it most common in horror games with no combat where you'll be running from whatever it is through hundreds of rooms and corridors FILLED with blunt and sharp objects that would make an effective weapon but you aren't allowed to pick them up because the dumbass you're controlling isn't allowed to. Only in L.A. Noires case the problem is made way more obvious because you're supposed to be solving puzzles but you're sort of limited in your approach by Cole's smooth brain.
But despite how much I just wrote about it, I'm still really enjoying the game and I'm VERY excited for another session. You can come check out the rest of my playthrough and watch me berate Cole for being a dipshit some more a www.twitch.tv/taurinensis
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