L.A. Noire Review

The facial capture was the reason it existed and it still holds up: performances were recorded whole, so a suspect's flicker of hesitation is real acting rather than an animator's guess, and interrogations genuinely reward watching a person instead of reading a dialogue tree. The recreation of 1947 Los Angeles is among the most careful open worlds ever built, assembled street by street from survey maps.

The problem is that the game around it is rigid. Cases run on rails, evidence is found by walking until the controller buzzes, and a wrong accusation rarely branches into anything meaningful, so the detective work is closer to a quiz with a marking scheme than an investigation. The driving stretches are long and dull enough that the game itself offers to skip them. A landmark and a slog in roughly equal measure, and the studio did not survive making it.