I loved and hated LA Noire. I have four big thoughts about the game in reflection. No spoilers, fret not.

Getting around town is the absolute pits. You do a whole lot of driving and it is a whole lot of boring. Oh, I know you can get your partner to do all the driving, but then where do you get to experience the city? Los Angeles, for all that it is hyped up to be, is a boring, boring, borrrrrrrring city with absolutely no life about it. I hate driving through blandsville, and I hate the idea that I need to suck up to the idea of blandsville and if I hate it so much, I need to turn my partner into my chauffeur.

The only thing worse than this are all the cars they included for the period piece. There are a ton of cars, and all of them are worthless. Keep your cop car; it has a radio and there are guns in the boot. What does any other car have? A whole lot of nothing. Even the cool cars you can find in those out-of-the-way garages are crap because a) they are in out-of-the-way garages and b) still no radio or guns. I would have loved to drive any of the bonus cars provided once I found them, they went into a personal garage right by whichever precinct I worked out of. Otherwise, they are on the other side of L.A., and I think I recently explained that driving through that town sucks, so it is not happening.

One of the things I loved were the side-quests dispatch radioed you while driving between crime scenes and relevant locations. Again, driving blows, but if you did not drive, you would miss the radio dispatches and a chance to do something fun. The side-quests are generally about some goon or a group of goons up to no good, and you get to riddle them with bullet holes faster than Kent follows Clark. They are fun, make you feel like a cop, and add a little variety to your main case. Good on them, and the only thing they could have done to make the side-quests better would have been to include more of them.

I love working cases. The main story and the plots of some of the cases are ripped off and a little cliche at times, but are pretty fun to tear into and find a bad guy at the end of them. You get to interrogate suspects and their associates, investigate crime scenes and areas of interest, chase people in cars (the only time cars matter) and chase people on foot (suckier than cars, really), and be an absolute badass of a cop. I found the stories compelling, pushing me to find all the evidence I could, suck dry the people in interviews, and do my best to shut up that damn music.