Keep political discussion to other, more appropriate subreddits. Sources are preferred over third-party sites. Low-effort content, unofficial videos, misleading titles and posts, image macros, theories about connections to other games and memes may be removed. RulesĪll content must be directly related to L.A. underworld and even members of his own department to uncover a secret that could shake the city to its rotten core. In his fight to climb the ranks and do what's right, Phelps must unravel the truth behind a string of arson attacks, racketeering conspiracies and brutal murders, battling the L.A. Corruption is rampant, the drug trade is exploding, and murder rates are at an all-time high. Noire so much more satisfying than the deeply satisfying ending of Battlefield Hardline.Īnyway, please check out my piece on Hardline for KQED Arts.A dark and violent crime thriller set against the backdrop of 1940’s Los Angeles.Īmid the post-war boom of Hollywood's Golden Age, Cole Phelps, an LAPD detective is thrown headfirst into a city drowning in its own success. I find a deeply unsatisfying ending like that of L.A. It doesn’t let you partake in a fantasy of being a noble hero who saves the day and brings vast systems of corruption to justice, but it does say that resistance to those systems of corruption is possible, though it may not succeed and it may come at a great cost. Instead, Phelps is ground to dust by that machinery of corruption, and in the end, the machine soldiers on. A narrative about a cop finding redemption and dismantling the vast machinery of corruption within the LAPD would have been absurd. Your character, Cole Phelps, ultimately takes a stand against corruption in the LAPD. Noire was its willingness to do none of those things. The game wants to leave you feeling good, feeling excited, feeling rewarded and powerful. It’s a rewarding ending, in the sense that it makes you feel like Mendoza, and you, have been tangibly and meaningfully rewarded for your quest, not with the satisfaction of defeating corruption, but of harnessing the power of corruption for yourself. The bad guy is defeated but his evil empire remains, and now you’ve got the keys to it. The game ends on a note of ambiguous excitement and potential. In Hardline’s final moments, Mendoza, once a helpless, bumbling pawn in the schemes of a corrupt police captain and later, when he refused to play along, a man framed for crimes he didn’t commit, takes his revenge against the man who used him and then threw him away. SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF HARDLINE FOLLOW The more meaningful contrast between the two games, for me, is how they resolve their stories of police officers going up against corruption within the police force. It couldn’t be more simplistic or less involving. I laughed out loud when I earned a trophy called “Keep Digging, Detective” for all my dogged police work of holding down X. You have a magic gadget that senses when evidence is nearby and vibrates, and all you have to do (or not do, if you’d rather just ignore it), is hold a button down for a few seconds while looking at the object to “analyze” it. Hardline, by contrast, incorporates the concept of “evidence” as only the shallowest nod to the game’s “you’re a cop” premise. The city of Los Angeles is home to some of the most recognized landmarks in the nation. These sections take time, and they call for you to pay attention, to look around, to observe details, and sometimes to try to draw conclusions based on those details. The game’s cases are maddeningly structured to sometimes give you the sense that you can actually “solve” them while in fact you can’t, the “right” answer is sometimes entirely out of your character’s grasp, but that’s not a flaw of the gameplay mechanics, it’s a flaw of the story they’re used in the service of. Noire, gathering evidence is an actual, physical process of looking around environments, of investigating. Noire is a tremendously flawed game, I can’t help but think that in direct comparison to Hardline, its infinitely more successful in both areas. That’s a very different game in which you play as a cop, but like Hardline, it finds a way of incorporating investigative police work into the action, and its narrative deals with corruption on the police force. In the days since finishing that game, I’ve been thinking a bit about L.A. I wrote about the single-player campaign of Battlefield Hardline for KQED Arts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |