That would be fine, but we’re sitting at a desk with a mouse and keyboard under our fingers – it would be nice to feel like we’re actually doing something. However, LA Noire pushes this idea too far: the first few hours feel more like a giant QuickTime Event, with the game prompting you to press a button or walk a clearly marked path from A to B every few minutes. Injecting games with the need to think, observe and not just frantically hammer Space or Escape to skip cutscenes and start shooting stuff is to the benefit of gaming at large.
Team Bondi's ambition – to resuscitate the adventure game genre while blending in elements of film-making – is certainly laudable. Left: lowest detail, Right: highest detail. Might it be worth more, or is the 73 per cent user average closer to the truth?
The release of LA Noire on PC also acts as an excellent opportunity to look back at the game as a whole and see if it's still worthy of the 89 per cent average that it was given by critics when it was originally released.
It does, even if it doesn’t like Windows UAC (but then again, who does?) The Complete Edition will also be coming to consoles, but we were mostly interested in whether the game played well on PC. The Complete Edition also includes all the previous DLC for the console version released in May, including five missions, the Badge Pursuit Challenge and all the add-on weapons and outfits. LA Noire doesn't look much worse with the image quality settings all dialled down, although a PC with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E8220, 4GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 5770 1GB struggled to play it at even the lowest settings. The Complete Edition of LA Noire has been tweaked over the past six months by Rockstar Leeds to offer a decent range of graphical options for the PC, but cranking everything to maximum and the jaggies and pixel-creep are horrific. You start off as a uniformed beat cop, before graduating to a detective role I brew some tea and start looking for truth in a grey garden of empty promises. Not to take a phone call from some dame we met last night, not to snatch the last doughnut from the tray before Harry gets in - I'm tired, but I'm going to give this my all. It’s taken six months to get here, and we’re not about to throw that away. It's a copy of LA Noire for PC - 'The Complete Edition'. The post arrives - a bundle of tatty jiffy bags straining against red elastic restraints, but only one makes it as far as my desk, falling with an empty thump. It’s almost lunchtime but the street lights still glow sickly under the grey clouds. The sky is as grey as the cigarette smoke trailing out of the dimly lit doorways that line the street tired-eyed workers desperate for one last fix before they head back inside. LA Noire PC Review Publisher: Rockstar Games