LA Noire was very good, the facial animation is something to behold and the story wasn't too bad (homicide was my favourite storyline). Buuut, too often everything that happened was connected to the same case, there were only really two storylines in the whole game split into "cases". I would liked to have seen more cases that weren't connected to the main story - or major cases as they might be called. The other problem with the game is that it is far too easy, your are constantly lead in the right direction and do extremely little detective work under your own steam. The game is very "samey", it could have been so much more, but it's only a disappointment to me because it has opened many new boxes yet left them half-filled, I guess I should be grateful that it opened them at all.
Recommendations:
Minecraft (~$10) - Rearranging blocks is addictive.
Beneath A Steel Sky (FREE) - The best point and click adventure game I've ever played, it's a real classic from the 90's.
Mafia (~£10) - One of my favourite games of all time. Technically it's a simple drive, run and shoot game but there's so much more to it than that. The atmosphere is brilliant - set in 20's 30's prohibition era USA - there's an excellent ebb and flow to the game, one minute you're pootling along in your car enjoying the music and the next you're tearing through the streets, guns blazing!
Unlike every other game I've played, in MAFIA car crashes hurt - which seems fairly logical - this makes driving fast actually fun and tense because one slip up and you could be dead - I really can't understand why other games don't do this. Two other unique mechanics are speed limits and traffic lights. At first you might think this sounds dull, who wants to obey the speed limit or stop for red lights? This adds to the atmosphere of the game and the ebb and flow of it all. Mafia is all about high-profile actions versus low-profile actions. Sometimes you'll need to break the law (you play a gangster after all!) but other times it's in your best interest to obey the law and go unnoticed.
If you have committed a minor crime the police will only issue you a fine, but serious crimes will warrant an arrest, if you fire at the cops they will fire back, but they don't kill everything they see like in GTA games.
I would recommend getting this game on PC as it was originally developed for PC, the console ports were released a number of years later, are more expensive and as far as I can recall have more annoying loading points than the PC version.
