10 Awesome Video Games Ruined By TWO Terrible Mechanics
5. Interrogation & Combat - L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire is one of the most creative video games of the last decade(ish), a visually ground-breaking love-letter to classic film noir, centered less around gunplay than investigating and interrogation.
But the game's admittedly ambitious interrogation mechanics have proven intensely divisive ever since release.
Though the recent remaster fixed the interrogation prompts to be less-ambiguous, there's still a frequent disconnect between the tone intended by players and the one that protagonist Cole actually adopts.
Also, trying to read NPCs' faces for "tells" during interrogations isn't nearly as refined as Rockstar hyped it up to be, and so it often proves more frustrating than intuitive.
Secondly, there's the combat, which while not too frequent throughout the game is abundant enough to be majorly irritating every time it shows up.
Between the floaty gunplay and unresponsive close-quarters fisticuffs, it feels like a massively clunky afterthought.
When neither the interrogations nor the action-driven elements quite work as intended, you've got an almost-incredibly game failed by its rough fundamentals.