Criminal Flaws Don't Lock Up L. A. Noire

     Calls rain in from all over the city, like drops of blood running through a dying man’s fingers, clutching at his newfound chest wound. In Central, a hit-and-run leaves the victim splattered across the road, bloody skidmarks as his life comes to a screeching halt. A few blocks away, a hopeful Hollywood starlet is found battered, bloodied, and beaten in a park, her dreams having bled dry long before the warm dawn sun found her cool dead body. Across town, a family of four burned alive in their house overnight. The American Dream, up in smoke. Somewhere in Hollywood, two jazz musicians overdosed on some smuggled drugs. Cool cats getting colder by the second.

     All these modern horror stories are the pulp on the pages of L. A. Noire, Rockstar’s new crime-themed sandbox game. In this twist to Rockstar’s usual gameplay formula, you play on the law’s side of the law, assuming the role of Detective Cole Phelps, a Pacific Theater World War II veteran come back to police the streets of Los Angeles. Starting out as a beat-cop, you quickly move up to detective work, taking cases at four desks: traffic, arson, vice, and homicide. At each desk, the aforementioned stories start only half-told, and it’s up to you and some keen, if sometimes questionable, detective work to fill in the gaps and make the partial stories whole.