10 Amazing Video Games With Terrible Open Worlds
2. L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire is a weird game for a lot of reasons. It has some of the most obtuse dialogue options ever and there's this nagging sense that the game keeps insisting that the player's choices matter, while not even presenting the illusion that they do. The game explicitly scores you after each case based on how "right" or "wrong" you played it.
Its lovingly crafted depiction of 1940s Los Angeles only serves to reinforce this myth that anything you do matters. Like a lot of the games in this list, the city sure is nice to look at, but that's all it is outside of an occasional car chase.
There are secret cars to find, but with the story as on rails as it is, they all feel wildly out of place. Something about a newly-promoted detective driving up to the scene of an arson in the 1940s equivalent of a Mclaren breaks the immersion just a tiny bit.
They could have just made a more interactive, high-tech version of Ace Attorney and the game might be much more fondly remembered today.