izigame.me

TL;DR:

I think this game is worth your time if you are someone who wants to see a piece of video game history. Its a cool time capsule to see some novel ideas that have never really been seen again.
However, as a video game in the year 2022 being judged purely from a "Did I have a good time" stance, I don't think I would recommend this game to the average game-liker.
If you want to see what I mean, please read on.

Pros


The main cast is well written. Cole Phelps, Kelso, and the various partners (Roy especially). They have a decent amount of depth, have some flaws, and are all around engaging enough to keep everything going.
The facial acting is quite impressive. Not much else to say about it, its very impressive even running on a 10+ year old engine. It really does do a lot of the heavy lifting with the presentation of the game.
The Kelso character swap was a nice surprise, albeit a bit too late.
Credit has to be given for attempting to be a 3rd person GTA-esque video game where shooting/killing is not the primary gameplay.


Mixed


When you first start playing the game, it pulls a really cool magic trick on you. You are really trying to review all of your case notes, thinking the case through, trying to make logical decisions when interrogating people and determining a suspect. During this time, it can be frustrating but it feels neat for a while, you really feel like you are playing something special. Then you realize that logic goes out the window during interrogations, and you really just need to laser focus on the facial animations. It really brought the experience down once you make this realization.
The newspapers (AKA the main story) are miss-able. Its all fine and dandy if you (like me) manage to find every single one of them, but wow I can't imagine how frustrating it would be if you were to miss one of these.
The "Collectible" conflicts with the game design. A collectible "x/105" shows up when you get into a new car. It is subtly telling you to collect them all! However, you are a police officer, and probably shouldn't just be stealing other peoples cars. Also, you only get notified of side quests when you are in a police car, thus the game de-centivizes you both intrinsically and extrinsically to just stay in the main police car. Feels really weird.
In-car dialogue happens before fast travelling. I actually really grew to appreciate this feature. Sometimes, you have a conversation with your partner while driving. Usually between key crime scenes, etc. If you use the fast travel option, it has a small driving scene on the way where it plays the conversation out where you don't miss it. Which is nice! However: ... Its almost like they knew the driving was super boring, and people would want to start fast travelling everywhere.
Not being able to fail missions. Once you realize that you cannot fail a mission no matter how badly you mess things up, it really takes a lot of the tension out of the gameplay. You can miss every single interrogation question, miss all non-essential clues, and choose the wrong suspect.... and you get a "Mission Completed". Yes, with a low rank, but its still very strange. I understand they didn't want to make it to where you have to repeat an entire hour-long case if you fail at the end, but it really does harm the gameplay experience. I think they should have made it hard to fail, but possible.


Cons


The side quests suck. After you do a few, you realize they are basically either shooting a handful of lackeys, or chasing one of the lackeys in a really repetitive "parkour" chase sequence. They get old fast. I stopped doing them altogether after the first desk.
The driving gets boring. The world is too big, with too little life in it, and Phelps is only talking to his partner maybe 15% of the time. After the first desk or so, I basically just resolved to fast-travelling everywhere. It just got so tedious and took too long.
The Open World is unnecessary. As the previous 2 bullets detail, the open world really is just shoddy window dressing. Its a cool setting to see, but it really feels like they built a tenth of it, and then just copy pasted it everywhere. It just feels lifeless. Side quests all require you to be in your cop car so you can't try out other cars unless you want to ignore them, and also break immersion as a cop. The landmarks are few and far between and aren't terribly interesting, and the driving itself gets really boring really fast. Overall just feels like a waste of development resources to try and make it feel like a GTA game.
The combat stinks. I'm aware this isn't supposed to be a super combat heavy game, but it objectively just is not good. It is the most barebones thing of all time. Again I'm aware this isn't a shooter, but it deserves to be mentioned especially since combat scenarios start appearing more and more often towards the end.
"Doubt" is the correct answer 2/3 of the time. I swear no matter how I try to read people or point out lies, doubt is more times than not the correct answer. I'm always 3 questions in being like "okay theres no way its gonna be 4 doubts in a row", yet sure enough - "Doubt" was correct. Choosing "Lie" is insanely risky because first you have to assume they aren't telling the truth (which again relies entirely on the facial acting), but then second, you have to know exactly which piece of evidence would contradict it. This is one of those segments where logic goes out the window. There can be multiple pieces of evidence which you would logically think could disprove a lie. But if you don't pick the exact right one the game wants, they just get mad and you miss that question. It is probably the most frustrating part of the gameplay.
The game tells you when you mess up. It really leads to a frustrating experience when every single time you make a mistake, the game tells you. I honestly think that the game should have withheld this information until you have completed the case. Its not like you can load a save state anyways, and the game encourages replaying cases to get 5-stars. Since you can't undo your mistakes, I think it would have been far more immersive if you didn't quite know if they were lying to you or not. But nope, the game always just tells you that you fucked up, and you have to disregard everything the suspect had said. I'd honestly rather have been lead down false leads.
Apparently this exists in the "Remastered" version for Switch(?), but "Truth, Doubt, Lie" should have used their original names. "Coax, Force, Lie". I think these names better reflect the way Cole speaks to the suspects after you choose.


Conclusion

All in all, LA Noire is a heavily flawed game, with a lot of half-baked ideas. However, I really did want to love it. It showed a few moments of brilliance, but ultimately those moments got outweighed by constant frustration with what could have been.
I think it was worth playing for me, because lately I have been going through various landmark games to see what the fuss was about. It was a neat piece of gaming history that I won't forget, but yikes I'm not gonna recommend it to anybody I know who isn't a freak like me.

Footnotes:

The negative reviews on this game are a sea of "Rockstar launcher sucks", which is absolutely true, but I think it drowns actual negative opinions of this game. It took me ~10 minutes of annoyance to deal with the launcher issues in practicality.
Its been about a month since I finished, forgot to write the review. So my thoughts are leaning heavier on the notes I took. Might have forgotten some stuff.