L.A. Noire: Nicholson Electroplating Review
Boom town.
Version tested: Xbox 360
Nicholson Electroplating is like an extra spleen that's been cloned from the stem cells of L.A. Noire and grafted onto its armpit. Sure, it's a mighty fine spleen and all, but if you're just gonna stick it on there, don't be surprised when it fails to come alive.
L.A. Noire is an organism; it can't be broken up into modules. That's what makes L.A. Noire so special, and Nicholson Electroplating so not.
The Nicholson case, a downloadable add-on released this Tuesday, opens with a boom that spreads shrapnel and destruction across a half-dozen city blocks and lofts a mushroom cloud into the air. The epicentre of the blast is the titular metal-treatment plant, which is obliterated.
Playing as Cole Phelps, you and fellow arson detective Herschel Biggs rush to the disaster scene, where you quickly uncover evidence of an experimental aluminium-treatment technique. Because nothing is simple in Phelps' L.A., a miasma of corporate and international intrigue surrounds this lucrative process.
The case inserts itself into the L.A. Noire timeline at an awkward moment. It comes in the middle of the third act, during Phelps' stint as an arson detective. (By the way, I'm going to touch lightly on some plot details of that third act now, so if that offends your sensibilities, skip down a few paragraphs.)
Phelps' arson assignment is when L.A. Noire transforms from "only" an interesting game into an outstanding one. In the manner of all great noir thrillers, the game grabs all its dangling threads and weaves them together.
Those newspaper cut-scenes and war flashbacks; the tantalising near-adequacy of the interview system; the game's insistence on methodical, by-the-numbers police work: they all now sing in harmony.
I TOLD him not to move his Xbox while the disc was spinning! And now look.
The game gets bold here. A new protagonist squeezes Phelps out of the picture for a while. It's a courageous creative decision that pays off. Phelps' war "buddy" Jack Kelso finally provides a proper foil to our hero. Kelso gives Phelps some depth and, in a certain light, turns him into something of an anti-hero.
As the facts come together in the Kelso/Phelps arson investigation, it's increasingly hard to tell where the action is going to turn. It's like the approaching resolution of the mystery is closing in on L.A. Noire, and in response the game turns into a cornered cat. It's ready to lash out in any direction. Because L.A. Noire wears so many guises, there are a lot of ways it can go: a shootout, a tense interview, a careful hunt for clues?
L.A. Noire's fragile glories depend on the confluence of a huge number of threads. Nicholson Electroplating doesn't have confluence. In a game where context is everything, this case sits alone.
There is some hand-waving dialogue at the outset of the case that nods toward the main story. Phelps and partner Biggs vamp for the cameras a bit. Gee, we really should be working on that time-sensitive, life-or-death case, shouldn't we? Then there's a big explosion. It's the developers' way of saying, "And now: This."
Tip: You can tell he's lying on account of he's wearing a hat.
Because it can't fit into the flow of L.A. Noire proper, this fragment, Nicholson Electroplating, has to find other ways to justify its existence. Fatally, it chooses to take each of L.A. Noire's individual "features" and amp them up a little.
No game can be evaluated merely as the sum of its parts, but L.A. Noire is especially resistant to compartmentalisation. Much like Heavy Rain before it (and maybe more so), if you break this game down into a list of features, the whole thing dissolves into farce.
Taken alone, the gunplay is generic. The driving is sort of clumsy. Searching for clues is a glorified point-and-click exercise.
Rockstar played up its facial-scanning technology in advance of the game's release. We were supposed to drool: Ooh, the faces, the faces, look at these faces! How did we ever play games without all these FACES?
The faces look nice enough, but the game's insistence on showing off that technology can be laughable. Most lying suspects "hide" their guilt with all the subtlety of a Charlie Chaplin character with black pepper up his nose.
My mom happened to be in town while I was playing Nicholson Electroplating for this review. She caught a glimpse of Cole Phelps walking in place after he hit a wall, and she giggled. She said, "This reminds me of Clutch Cargo," a 1960s cartoon with famously crude animation. So much for faces.
I would like to see Rockstar executives talk about the incredible realism of L.A. Noire's characters while behind them, a huge screen shows what Cole Phelps looks like when he is climbing a ladder.
Then there is the Truth/Doubt/Lie interrogation system. You must choose one of these options each time a suspect answers one of your questions. Choose the right one, and you hear a three-note jingle of success. Otherwise you get the sad music.
The internal logic that determines which choice is correct can be outrageously obscure. There have been times when I thought the game should be called L.A. Sad Music.
It's a recipe for one of the silliest games of this console generation - except that in practice, it's one of the best. Incorporated into the whole, all this stuff works.
Pounding pavement for clues in the Hall of Records is exciting, because you have a feeling that this is where you'll finally peel back the curtain on those shifty insider types. It doesn't seem mundane; it seems like the world is about to change.
Look out, motorists! I'm driving on the British side for my Eurogamer pals today. Plus, I stole this fire truck.
And while the frustration of a misfired line of questioning never feels good, a little pain is OK. Because over time, the ever-present potential for failure ratchets up the tension of every interrogation. (The capriciousness of the system has the added benefit of being honest: luck and gut instinct play a part in real-life interviews, too.)
Nicholson Electroplating doesn't benefit from this larger flow, and as such, the inanity of L.A. Noire's component parts are laid bare.
The case brings you to an airplane hangar to search for clues. The logic seems to be that if hunting for clues in a small room is fun, then hunting in an enormous building must be a rare treat! And certainly not sadistically boring!
The car-chase feature has also been isolated and turned up to 11, insofar as it is a longer-than-usual car chase. Your partner screams that you need to get closer so he can take out the guy's tyres.
He fires off shot after shot, but he never hits those tyres. Because if he did, you would never get to experience the splendour of this lengthened car case. Truly, it is of somewhat greater duration than you are accustomed.
Also, there's this one part where you shoot a bunch of guys, and there sure are a lot of guys.
Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. Also pictured: Cole Phelps' Spruce Caboose.
The case isn't entirely misconceived. Recognising the need to have some larger stakes as a driving force behind the individual set pieces, the developers incorporate the great Hollywood figure of Howard Hughes - specifically, his "Spruce Goose" boondoggle - and the lesser-known O'Connor Electro-Plating Corp. explosion, which happened much as the game portrays it. (The O'Connor incident is recounted with entertaining colour in a 1947 Time magazine article.)
Yet the strength of L.A. Noire is myth-making, and this feels closer to myth-borrowing. That's not to say that L.A. Noire proper isn't also inspired by actual Los Angeles lore; it is. Yet in the broader game, over the course of many hours, those bits of legend metastasise and intertwine and grow into a thriving experience of their own.
Nicholson Electroplating doesn't have time for that slow-burn organic process. It attempts a brute-force attack on greatness and comes up short. Yet the contrast between this expansion and the main game sheds a revealing light on the thoughtful craftsmanship of experience that makes L.A. Noire such a treasure.
5 / 10
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Comments (76) Latest comment 11 months ago
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I can't trust a word this guy writes after his 4/10 Mafia II review.
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Those would be all three of the ways it can go, in fact. Unless you count a hostage chase as separate. Which it isn't, really.
I dunno, maybe I was one of the few people who actually couldn't help *but* compartmentalise the aspects of LA Noire, and found each of the aspects to be rather lacking. Great story, but terrible mechanics.
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You guys need to listen to the E3 podcasts.
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Eh?
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@Oli - A shame you/EG took a similarly hands-off approach to the ludicrous Mafia II review.
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By the way, maybe Eurogamer could arrange a podcast via Skype or something similar and get Mr. Teti involved on a more regular basis. His hosting of the E3 podcasts was gold.
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He's brilliant on the Podcast, his Mafia 2 review has left me wary of his reviews though.
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If I use my John Teti review conversion algorithm and I add a pinch of Mafia 2 4/10 and find the difference between this and my opinion of the aforementioned game, perhaps this DLC will be worth more of a 7 or 8 for me.
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Revolutionary my arse. All style, no substance more like.
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Yes, L.A. Noire is particularly shallow in essentially being a series of mini-games and disappointed that this DLC thinks that more of each is better, particularly when in isolation they're rather dull, clunky and frustrating so the score seems about right. Having siad that though, the charm of L.A. Noire as a whole is the depth of the story and how it links together, and whilst it has it's faults, as an 'interactive experience', it's one of the best examples we've seen in this, or any gen - perhaps that's why this DLC falls down because in isolation, and without weaving in to the greater narrative, it does just feel soul-less and and dilutes the experience.
Oh, but the trace evidence finding in a large area would be 'masochistic' on the behalf of the player. Sadism would be on the part of the designer in creating it in the first place.
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Lightly? =/
GOTY
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I LOL'd.
I then made a mental note never to trust his critical output, if you can call it that, again.
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I would have agreed.
Teti is one of the few reviewers that actually use the full scale. His 4/10 Mafia II review wasn't far off. It was the definition of average. Same goes for Noire, all smoke and mirrors. Take away the facial tech and it is a bog standard game at best.
Why bother with a 1-10 scale if it won't be used? If it makes you feel better, you can bash the other reviewers for handing 8's to everything that we now percieve as 'good', with 7s being 'average'.
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They should go the way of GTAIV's DLC and release it all as stand-alone "mini"campaigns. Seems much smarter than shoehorning in extra cases.
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Because, god forbid, somebody would actually be critical, right?
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It's a game of contradictions, bad writing and illogical design. That it starts to pick up in the final act is only so it can then throw away the excitement and interest it's finally built with the world's least interesting conspiracy; a conclusion that, like the rest of the story, doesn't grab your attention or go anywhere.
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Shouldn't they rather focus on questioning people's sexual orientation in multiplayer games?
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Edited due to my linking stupidity
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"It's so fashionable to hate this game."
5/10 is the score the main game should have clearly got.
In my first hour of play, the game was verging on a 10/10 from me. But 3 hours in, I was beginning to realise that there was nothing else this game had to offer. The same dull series of mechanics over and over.
A massive shame to be honest. The world is there, but nothing to do in it.
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[link url=http://www.vg247.com/2011/06/23/la-noire-to-launch-on-pc-ths-fall/
]http://www.vg247.com/2011/06/23/la-noire...[/link]
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John Teti is like a friend of mine who I like to refer to as the "anti-investor". When he tells me that something is a "sure thing" I know to start shorting it.
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As far as I can tell he praises the main game for its mechanics but says that they've taken these too far in the DLC which then makes it long winded and a bit rubbish.
Judging by the comments from people that have played it, he's spot on.
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I have a new respect for John Teti after the E3 podcasts, they were great.
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Shouldn't you be off with your fellow intolerants on the Daily Mail website bitching about how much you hate foreigners?
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Wow, that was a realy stupid and xenophobic thing to say. Though I do know not every European are like that.
edit: well, maybe all the Germans are like that, because we all know they are Nazis.
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Was really excited about it before release, bought it on day 1 and couldn't wait to get home from work to play it, disappointed in the game after playing it for a while (expectations prob too high), but I would still rate it 8 out of 10 despite its many flaws.
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Look at it this way, at least no one has told you to "Get cancer" so things are improving
Loved the E3 podcasts by the way, I would suggest that they get you over for the GamesCom ones, but I don't want to upset Venatio.
edit=typo
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If you want to make racist and small-minded comments, there's always dailymail.co.uk
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Nothing of the sort.
But this is a man that went out of his way to mention the vibration when the character landed in Limbo. Unless I am mistaken games have been doing this for a while now.
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John was fantastic in the E3 podcasts and I thoroughly enjoy the reviews he writes as well.
Finished the case this afternoon & I'm inclined to agree with him.
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I LOLd. And then I looked at the faces.
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I like the way you put words together Teti. Entertaining read as always; more so because I have no investment in this until the obligatory GotY edition appears.
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It does bode well for the next GTA at least.
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Thanks for clearing that up. I have been enjoying the game but it is very disjointed and I tend to find I dont so much play the game as take on a case at a time
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In general I try to ignore who the reviewer is (just for the record I thought Mafia II didn't even deserve a 4/10...it was so bad I couldn't keep playing it for more than the first two hours - I really loved the first one though. strange, huh?).
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For me at least it's at best a 7/10 game, perhaps more 6/10. I'm not sure by the sounds of things the DLC will be any different so i won't bother with it.
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That actually makes me trust him even more. Although I would have given Mafia II a 6/10.
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And for God's sake, give your poor worn-out 'Enter' key a rest. You do not need a paragraph break after every bloody sentence. I'm forced to assume the reviewer's only actual writing experience comes from comment threads.