Parent's Guide: L.A. Noire - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Set in 40s Hollywood, LA Noire puts you in the stylish trilby of Cole Phelps, a war hero who leaves the forces to become a detective, and help keep the city streets clean. Putting your brain before your brawn, in LA Noire, you'll be doing pretty much what policemen do in real life - investigating a crime scene looking for clues, and pursuing suspects, before taking them in for interrogation, where it's a matter of watching their facial expression closely, and reading their body language to discover if they're lying or telling the truth - and pushing further if they're trying to pull a fast one.

A lot of LA Noire's been designed to be easy to pick up and play - you can hold Y next to a car in order to get your partner to drive you there, and should you die in combat three times, you'll be able to skip over the combat entirely, but thanks to the dark subject matter, LA Noire isn't really all that suitable for children. It's grim, slightly racist and covers a number of rather adult themes (one of the early cases involves the apparent rape of a 15 year old girl after you find her torn-off underwear in her purse). So while younger people may benefit from the wealth of easy-access options like the auto-drive and action sequence skipping, the rest of the game will still be unsuitable for them.

Placing you as a detective in charge of investigating a number of murder scenes, LA Noire is incredibly grim. Corpses are found bruised, bloodied and sometimes naked, with a variety of apparent causes of death. The strangulations are some of the more grim crime scenes, where the victims neck is sliced and bruised by the murder weapon. Later cases see you investigating narcotics-related deaths, where bodies are found with needles still inserted into arms, and later still arson cases, where the charred remains of the victims are all that's left.

Set in the 40s, LA Noire is also full of examples of behaviour that was "acceptable back then". In one cutscene a fellow detective goes into a bar, gets cross with the "French Negro from Africa" on the door for daring to touch him, and then heads into the back to talk to a singer who's just about to go on stage. This singer seems rather torn up about the death of a friend, so understandably doesn't really want to talk, but the detective takes issue with her attitude and backhands her around the face, reminding the "German junkie whore" to remember her place in future.

There's no co-op, or indeed any kind of multiplayer mode to speak of here (which doesn't quite make sense to us - Phelps is always with a partner in game, and co-op would have added an intriguing good cop/bad cop mechanic to the interrogations), so any kind of traditional family play is out of the question. However, a number of us had a pretty enjoyable time sharing the same game and taking it in turns to either interview suspects or drive from place to place (We trusted Editor Ian with driving, due to his vast amount of real-life driving experience. Unfortunately he ended up costing the LAPD $6,000 in damages). So while the game doesn't offer you any way of playing together, with a bit of imagination it's still possible.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360