Typically on the drive there will be a bit of banter between you and your partner, which drives character development (along with a series of flashbacks throughout the game). The basic gameplay loop involves being assigned a case, heading out to your car, then driving through an open-world retro imagination of Los Angeles to the scene of the crime. In LA Noire, players take on the role of Cole Phelps, a veteran who starts the game as a beat cop and slowly ascends the ranks with each newly solved case. This gameplay mechanic was fairly controversial at the time, and a little over six and a half years later I still am not sure whether or not I like it- But more on that later. Rockstar and Team Bondi paired this technology with one of the primary gameplay elements of LA Noire: Closely watching your subjects to use this subtle body language to drive intuition as to whether or not you’re being lied to. Quick sideways glances, small facial ticks, and other unbelievably subtle movements are all captured with shocking amounts of clarity. LA Noire was the debut title of a technology called MotionScan: The characters in game are played by real actors, and the facial animation seen in game is a composite of 32 individual camera feeds capturing even the smallest facial movements. Sports games of the time, in particular, were really starting to look far more lifelike as developers continued capturing more and more movement data points. Basically, by 2011 motion capture technology in both video games and movies was getting pretty good. LA Noire was a technical feat when it was first released, and unlike many older games that lean heavily on a specific technical showpiece, the game has aged surprisingly well. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game are sitting at a solid 89% on Metacritic, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise as Rockstar games typically always fall somewhere on the spectrum of “really good' to “great.' As the title not-so-subtly hints, LA Noire distills basically every film noire trope into a video game where you’ll be driving around Los Angeles solving crimes as a larger overarching plot line reveals itself as the crimes turn out to be related. Rockstar first released LA Noire in May of 2011 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and has seen a recent re-release on the Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

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