Recent reviews by Hedless

It's a Gears game, but it has "open world" segments that are completely pointless and should just stick to the hallway progress of old. Why are they pointless? You just use the vehicle to move from one location to another, and NOTHING happens in between. No vehicle fights, no enemy fights, nothing. The abilities they give you in this game are terrible to use and usually just gimmicky, should've just stuck with the gunplay.

Also a major reason why I'm thumbsdowning: I have all progress other than main mission progress in 2 acts so far. What do I mean by progress? In the open world segments mentioned above, you do side missions at the locations and usually get a nice reward. This happened once in the 2nd act but near the beginning so thought it was a minor bug. It happened again in the 3rd Act and lost 6+ hours of progress. This is absolutely unforgivable in game, so if you do decide to play through it, play in one sitting from Act to Act.

P.S. the vehicle can also bug out and become unusable several times. You fix this be reopening the game, but risk losing small amounts of progress by doing so.

Do not buy this game if you're coming off the high from TW:WH2! Even with the recent roadmap they posted, many of the glaring features of the game will be fixed in half a year at best, and over a year at worst!

Current issues:
Various bugs (Primarily AI pathing and taking orders to even attack something in front of them)
Various gameplay issues (The main campaign mechanic of dealing with and entering Chaos Portals that appear periodically. It is very common for players to just build tall and ignore nearby factions in order to deal with it).
Various gameplay balances (Slaneesh and Nurgle factions in particular).

The list of issues is extremely long and even acknowledged in their own roadmap, but once again...waiting this long for the changes to come? Buy it later when the game is actually fixed.

And to cap it all off: NO IMMORTAL EMPIRES UNTIL A YEAR FROM NOW/2.0 patch! Please, please save yourself the pain and only consider purchasing this when this game is balanced, fixed, and proper content is added.

I liked it before hat trading. Don't like after hat trading.

This non-recommendation doesn't mean it sucks, more like it barely qualifies for the h-game idea.

To best sum it up from myself, the "Scenes" and the actual gameplay (rpg combat, economy, etc.) have ZERO to do with each other, other than three certain parts for payment, which by that point, gold no longer matters. The gameplay itself is barely put together, although RPGmaker engine does a good job of avoiding the combat being a buggy mess, but the gameplay is shallower then a dry puddle in Death Valley, once again made worse where combat has zero to do with any of the "scenes".

These scenes themselves are pretty good with nice use of artistic and sound effects. Otherwise, pretty vanilla as far as certain kinds of off-material goes.

That's about all I can say from an objective point of view. Game is pretty short, abour 6-10 hours with dedicated attention. Anything else I would have to say would have to do with taste in content.

No matter how well set up you are, steps of risk management taken, and so on, this game will frustrate you. It is a grinding slog and masochistic climb to do anything with this game. At times, it feels like you're losing progress rather than making any. Coming from someone who loved a game like FTL (Faster Than Light), this is not worth it at all.

Pros:

Story! This game will keep you wanting more. What's around the next corner, what clues you can find, what people will reveal, and so on.

Asthetic is very good for the game, from the facial animations to the fashion and structures of the 40's!

Cons:

-Story. You're pretty much on rails the entire time, very, very little freeform involved in this game and its more similar to to those story-telling games you've been seeing as of late, like Walking Dead.

-Interrogations: What should be this game's shining star is it glaring weakness. There are several especially where the person being interrogated is sweating waterfalls, but they're still telling the truth besides having evidence that could prove otherwise, or vice versa. This makes or breaks this game and it's sad to see how inconsistent this part of the game is for how major of a role it takes.

-Guns and car chases: It really feels like they had no idea how to tweak this. Blind firing is really, really, VERY inaccurate to the point you can be point-blank to an enemy with a shotgun and still miss. So gunfights amount to shooting and soaking up damage on purpose.

Car chases are a nightmare because of 2 things:

1. You're a good cop, any damage, to vehicles, the enviornment, or people is on your head. One might argue this just makes the game more interesting. I was in this boat until...

2. Choice of vehicles and all criminals are hollywood stunt drivers. Most people, and I've read it on several forums and reviews, will only use the cop car they recieve. Part of the problem here is that most cars look the same to the average person of today, and they also find out they lose access to Street Crime sub-missions if they don't use a cop car, whose performance is questionable. On top of the 1# issue, criminals all seem to have magical speed and turning skill regardless of what vehicle they drive. Unless you memorize the route and staged issues, you'll never, ever be able to keep up on chases outside of just not losing them.

Summary:

L.A. Noire has awesome story, but just terrible, frustrating gameplay.

Special Note: YOU DO NEED TO MAKE A SOCIAL CLUB ACCOUNT AND LOG IN TO PLAY THE GAME. YOU CAN'T SKIP PAST IT, THERE'S DRM ON THIS GAME ESPECIALLY FOR ONE OF THE GAMEPLAY FEATURES.

Liked those old-fashioned platformers/shooters of Genesis/PC days? Like some crass humor as well as boob as butt? Want some genuine fun and non-buggy gameplay with your indy game?

This is the game for you! May or may not be hard for you depending on how you handle the game, but its a genuine romp while it lasts.

The downside is that it is really short, short enough to make the $7 price tag as of this review very meh, but its a great throwback and show of quality that even older games have over the the horrible indy shovelware that keeps coming out with horrible flash or 8-bit graphics and 2deep4u gameplay, if the gameplay isn't buggy that is.

This is definitely a breath of fresh air!