Especially considering it originally came out in 2011, I was impressed that playing through LA Noire

Read our original LA Noire review .) There are cops-and-robbers car chases and occasional gunfights, but most of it is a smartly paced, contemplative challenge that keeps you thinking. As a Los Angeles cop working in the 1940s, you’ll be sent to a weird and wonderful array of crime scenes where you find clues, interact with witnesses, and draw conclusions with a limited amount of hand-holding. I never thought I’d find myself interested in the forgery of pink slips until I met the diverse cast of suspects and witnesses involved in a grand theft auto scheme, and using the right pieces of evidence against each of them presented a test of its own. A few of the 21 cases are a little repetitive, but every time I was close to feeling bored, something completely unexpected would happen and draw me back in again.

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“ The stellar performances are captured down to every grimace and wrinkle.

The gunfights that happen in the open world are tedious and imprecise, too, and I’ll remember them more for how much I felt like I was fighting the Switch controller than for any of the enemies I was actually supposed to be shooting at. There’s also far too much driving considering how uninteresting it is, though you can skip a lot of it to fast-track your way to the drama LA Noire thrives on. I just wish the tedious obstacles didn’t exist at all, because just stringing together the good parts uninterrupted would’ve been so much better.At the same time, LA Noire definitely makes use of the Switch’s hardware in more ways than most ports. In any control scheme, you can choose to play with motion controls to move the camera and flip around items you’re inspecting at crime scenes. This comes in handy specifically if you’re looking for a label or a model number, and the motion controls are precise enough to match the in-game animations well. If you want to stick to handheld, it also has touch-screen features that let you finish the entire game without touching a controller, except to get to the menu. That does have a slight learning curve, like remembering to tap twice to interact with an object and to hold down on your car to have your partner drive, but when you know how it works it’s a smooth experience that would probably translate very well to a mobile port.But no matter how you play, it’s great it is to have this full, story-driven Rockstar game available on a console you can take with you anywhere. Note that LA Noire is large enough that it doesn’t fit on the Switch’s 32GB internal memory and therefore needs to be installed on a MicroSD, but when it is, loading screens are short and the battery lasts just under five hours.