Hands On: 'L.A. Noire'

Since emerging from the shadows last year, Rockstar's L.A. Noire has been building a steady buzz of excitement. The third-person game, being developed by Australian studio Team Bondi, bravely brings together action gameplay and slow-paced detective work based around some seriously dark themes, such as murder, rape and mutilation. The game is set in late 1940s Los Angeles, a time when America's post-war boom ushered in a new era of glamour, wealth and criminality. Players are tasked with solving a series of crimes written for the game and inspired by source material from the era, including the infamous and brutal Black Dahlia murder. Mostly, L.A. Noire is a game in which the player's ammunition is knowledge much more often than bullets. After a hands-off preview session with the game earlier in the year, Digital Spy went hands on to explore the stylish world of dark glamour, loose morals and grisly murders in L.A. Noire.

L.A. Noire doesn't feature levels or missions per se - instead the player takes on cases across five different desks of the police force - patrol (training), traffic, homicide, vice and a fifth desk, presumably some kind of special investigative unit. Main character Cole Phelps, played by Mad Men's Aaron Staten, has returned home from World War II as a military hero, joining the Los Angeles Police Department and being immediately fast-tracked to detective. Phelps is very much a 'by the book' sort of hero, always preferring to use his detective nous rather than a willingness to break the rules.

Rockstar openly admits that L.A. Noire is a "significant departure" for the publisher, taking a more considered and slow-paced approach to the action genre. The game features car chases, fighting and third-person shooting, but the vast majority of time will be spent doing police work: following up leads, surveying crime scenes, interrogating witnesses and seeing through the veils of deception to find the truth. We played the opening section of 'The Red Lipstick Murder', Phelps's first case after being promoted onto the homicide desk following the retirement of a veteran detective. His new partner, Finbar 'Rusty' Galloway, provides a bull-headed foil to Phelps's moral crusader.

An opening cinematic for the case featured a woman being dragged screaming from a car and then savagely beaten by a masked man, splatters of blood ejecting into the night air. After a briefing with the desk sergeant, Phelps and Rusty take on the case. There are instant similarities to GTA in the game's basic elements, such as the third-person controls, circular on-screen mini-map and core driving mechanics. However, at the crime scene things get very different as the player must rely on their senses much more than their reactions. Police on the scene and county coroner Mal Carruthers gave some initial information, but then it was down to us to find the clues, aided by the game's soundtrack.

Any time there are items to uncover, the music strikes up but gets quieter when the player moves too far away. A particular piano line indicates that Phelps is close to a key piece of evidence (Team Bondi is still tweaking the final tunes to denote new and discovered items). Pressing the X button causes Phelps to pick up an item, which can be manipulated to reveal its real truth. For example, the body showed that the woman's wedding ring had been removed and she had been given a Chelsea smile (cuts leading from the edge of the victim's mouth to her ears), which pointed to the 'Werewolf', the nickname given to the Black Dahlia killer by the press.

However, the plot was thickened by the fact that the killer had written the words 'f**k you BD, Tex' on the woman's body in red lipstick. Surveying the crime scene revealed various other bits of evidence, such as a miniature globe that threw up a mini-game for aligning the layers of the sphere to reveal that it's a cigarette lighter from The Bamba Club. At that stage, though, Rockstar cut the mission and we moved on to a case playable from start to finish. 'The Silk Stocking Murder', the third case on the homicide desk, featured a similarly brutal murder, this time of a poor Hispanic woman left naked in an alley. After travelling to the scene, we again had to scout around for clues. Some items in the game are red herrings and it's up to the player to work out which pieces of evidence should be followed up. All clues are logged in the notebook, an essential tool enabling the player to recheck evidence, track objectives and manage the interrogation system.

One new feature that Team Bondi has recently introduced is the intuition system, which is designed to replace standard difficulty settings. Due to the complexity of the gameplay, it was decided that easy, normal and hard settings just wouldn't work, and so the game defaults to its full difficulty level but players can spend Intuition Points to make things easier. Intuition can be spent during interrogations to remove one wrong answer provided by the interviewees, and they can also use them to find out what Rockstar's 'Social Club' online community did in the same situation, similarly to 'Ask the Audience' in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The third intuition shows all clues in a crime scene to avoid spending hours trying to track down the final item before moving on to the next stage. Intuition Points are earned by locating the right clues and discovering landmarks.

At the crime scene, the dead woman lay naked down a back alley, her throat slashed, her wedding ring finger mutilated and more words written on her body. In the woman's hand was half a library ticket bearing half of her name and address. A blood-spattered hat close to the body revealed that the woman's name was Antonia Maldonado, but the killer had also deliberately left a staggered blood trail leading us over nearby rooftops, picking up clues as we went. First, there was Antonia's necklace, and then her wedding ring and a note with three dice sides printed on it. Finally, we found her handbag containing the other half of the library ticket, and her full address. Players can set map waypoints immediately from the notebook, while car trips can be skipped by pressing triangle for your partner to drive. After travelling to the B&B where Antonia was living, we went to search her place, but found that someone else had beat us to it. Despite the messed up room, we still found out that Antonia's body was missing an old religious charm bracelet, and that she was getting a divorce from her husband.

Divorce papers revealed the husband's address, but before leaving it was necessary to interview the B&B owner, Barbara Lapenti. Questioning witnesses and suspects is all about judging reactions and then carefully delivering the right response. The player can challenge in three different ways: 'believe/coax' to take the soft approach, 'doubt/force' to put pressure on the subject and 'disbelieve/accuse' to use hard evidence to put them on the spot. Care must be taken to judge the right interrogation approach for each situation, but the game will never penalise a wrong decision. It takes time to get to grips with the nuances of the system, as there is genuine subtlety requiring a constantly keen sense of observation.

Everyone in the game gives off little tells to show when they are lying, but they are also not robots, and picking the wrong approach will fail to bring about the desired result. For example, Antonia's window had been broken with a metal bar outside revealing that it was a break-in. The landlady denied hearing anything, but we mistakenly picked the doubt/force option rather than presenting her with the evidence we had collected in the room, which meant that we missed out on a clue. The ultimate outcome of cases never changes, but good performances in the interrogations could bring about a result more quickly. After a less than successful interrogation of Barbara Lapenti, we headed off to the husband's address to see what he could reveal.

L.A. Noire plays out in a huge open-world version of Los Angeles. Rockstar would not disclose the exact size of the world, but the map appears of a similar scale to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV. The city looks fantastic, really bringing forth the aesthetic of the era, similarly to the fellow post-WWII world of Empire Bay in 2K's Mafia II. However, this is very much an "open-world with a linear path" rather than a sandbox in the truest sense, and there is a general focus that Phelps is "always on the case". As soon as we entered the flat occupied by Antonia's husband, a scuffle broke out between him and his brother. The melee combat system has clearly been tweaked since we last saw L.A. Noire, but it is still pretty basic. After locking onto opponents with L2, there are options for punches, dodges and grapples. It's all pretty pedestrian stuff, but certainly an enjoyable enough distraction from the investigation.

After subduing the brothers, we quizzed the husband about Antonia and he revealed that they had an argument the previous night, before she ran off. We then went door-knocking around the adjacent flats to gather more evidence, with one of the residents revealing that the husband actually followed Antonia out of the building after the argument, debunking his alibi about being at home all night with his brother. After taking him into custody on suspected murder charges, a search of his flat disclosed a stock of brandy bottles inside a case from the Just Picked fruit warehouse, and a pack of matches from a bar called El Diablo. We could follow up the two addresses, or head straight into the interrogation of the husband. As always, the choices made will slightly impact how the case progresses.

However, the investigation was interrupted after the station rang to say that more letters had surfaced from the serial killer playing a part in the game's overarching narrative. One of the letters featured cut out newspaper letters carrying a sinister warning, signed off with the same message pasted on the body from 'The Red Lipstick Murder' - "F**k you BD, Tex". The other featured text from Prometheus Unbound, a play by English Romantic poet Percy Shelley. These two clues do not factor in 'The Silk Stocking Murder', but rather provide indicators as to the wider storyline on the homicide desk, and possibly beyond. We then interrogated the husband, this time being careful to judge his responses more closely. The husband admitted that Antonia went to a bar after their fight, but believably claimed that he did not kill her. The plot thickened once more.

At the El Diablo, the bar owner said that Antonia was drunk the previous night, waving around her divorce papers in celebratory mood. At the end of the night, she headed to the Just Picked fruit market over the road to find a cab, eventually being picked up by a brown Ford coupe. At the market, the owner Clem was a touch resistant under interrogation. He corroborated the story about the brown Ford, but certainly appeared to be hiding something. A search of his premises revealed a back room containing enough booze to keep Keith Richards happy (for a few days, at least), along with a jewellery box with an innovative lock requiring us to match the three dice sides from the note at the crime scene.

Opening the container revealed a dismantled charm bracelet, clearly the one owned by Antonia. But the most damning piece of evidence by far was a scalpel on the side, still soaked in sticky blood. Possibly realising that the game was up, Clem bolted to his truck and tried to make a getaway. This launched an action sequence, in which we had to chase down the escaping suspect while Rusty shot out his tyres. Anyone who has played a GTA game will be instantly familiar with the car chase process, requiring fast and aggressive driving to halt the retreating foe. With Clem's vehicle disabled, he was taken into custody and charged with the murder of Antonia Maldonado. A summary screen at the end of the case revealed various stats and pieces of information, including that the man was given the death penalty for the crime.

One of the most interesting aspects about L.A. Noire is how the outcomes of the cases are perceived by Phelps. Acting as the moral compass of the game, the detective is not always sure about the convictions he secures. Both Clem and the barman claimed that a brown Ford coupe picked up Antonia, but this vehicle was never found. The district attorney may be happy that someone was sent to the gas chamber for the crime, but it's easy to question your own logic, and to wonder whether the right person ended up seeing justice. Why would Clem leave so many clues at the crime scene to get himself caught? Was he set up? And if so, who is the actual killer? In L.A. Noire, it seems, few things are ever particularly clear-cut.

L.A. Noire has the potential to be a genuinely brave leap forward for video gaming. After all, the title will this year become the first game ever to be honoured at the Tribeca Film Festival, celebrating the crossover between filmmaking and interactive entertainment. Alongside the cerebral investigation and storytelling, the game also incorporates third-person shooting sequences similar to GTA and Red Dead Redemption. L.A. Noire could well build on the success of Quantic Dream's groundbreaking Heavy Rain, dealing with dark themes in a cinematic storyline that is also crucially great fun to play. However, the game's real challenge will be its sense of balance - can the mix of detective work and action really satisfy the majority of players? Equally, will the overarching narrative, most probably involving the Black Dhalia mystery, have enough weight to ensure the individual investigations don't feel episodic? We'll find out when L.A. Noire makes its case this spring.

> Click here to follow our ongoing coverage of Rockstar's L.A. Noire

L.A. Noire will be available on Xbox 360 and PS3 from May 17 in North America and May 20 in Europe.