LA Noire

LA Noire has been a long time coming. It was created in Sydney by independent games company Team Bondi (housed, despite the name, in Ultimo) before it was announced that Rockstar Games were investing in the title with a view to a 2008 release, followed by three years of shifting on-sale dates – which, to be fair, was also the case with Rockstar titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. It could so easily have been a disaster but – as with the aforementioned titles – it's set to be a modern classic in gaming.

You play as Cole Phelps (with the voice and face of Mad Men's Aaron Staton), an ambitious cop in the Los Angeles of 1947, whose no-nonsense investigative style gets results and attention as he progresses from cop to detective through homicide and vice and beyond, closing cases and slowly uncovering the dark underbelly of the City of Angels, while also revealing a squirming secret in his own past. Gansters, dope fiends, crime lords and femmes fatale abound, and the writers have clearly enjoyed playing with the conventions of film noir crime classics, while also bringing the odd piece of historical material into the mix (such as the notorious "Black Dahlia" murder).

Compared with most Rockstar game protagonists, Phelps is a bit of a cold fish: his straight arrow, by-the-book police officer is somehow less relatable than, say a high plains drifter with blood on his hands or an on-the-make Eastern European immigrant. Still, it suits the game's mood, and contrasts with the several less-than-meticulous officers that Phelps is paired with as the game progresses.

Aside from anything else, LA Noire looks amazing. At first glance the animations aren't noticeably advanced from the aforementioned titles, but wait until you get close up: the use of motion capture technology gives the character faces an expressiveness that no game has managed to date – and given how much the plot relies on being able to read facial cues from suspects, that's where the game could so easily have collapsed.

Questioning suspects is key. Correctly surmising that they're lying or telling the truth, based on the clues you've accumulated from crime scene searches and other interviews, helps you to a successful arrest. Get too many questions wrong and you'll close off avenues of enquiry, limiting your ability to close the case. And, importantly, your choices have consequences: interviews can't be replayed without restarting the entire level, so it's generally better to muddle through as best you can than redo an hour of gameplay.

But this is also Rockstar game, so there are certain things that players expect: a sandbox-style open world to roam through (which is freakin' enormous, by the way: Red Dead Redemption's map might be a smidge bigger, but if so it's not by much), a whole lot of driving between destinations, side missions (which is where most of the car chases and gunplay take place) and collectable locations and cars to tick off your list, which are important in the first instance (one case relies upon your being able to identify crime locations via cryptic messages) and unnecessary in the second. And you'd better like cutscenes: Call of Duty fans will find the ratio of action to story to shockingly low.

While the game is late and over-budget, at least it's all there on the screen. The locations are detailed, the glitches gratifyingly few, the gameplay smooth and the dialogue rich (and it's not hard to see why Rockstar wanted in: even if the game was a flop, licensing Team Bondi's facial motion capture software is going to be gold mine). By just about any standard you can imagine, LA Noire is a masterpiece.

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