14 Most Polarising Video Games Of The Decade (So Far)

5. L.A. Noire

What Works?

As a reinvention of the point n' click genre, L.A. Noire succeeded in having the best facial renders in gaming history. To this day they're astonishingly lifelike, factoring into gameplay as you're tasked with identifying ticks and 'tells' when grilling suspects, the result being one of the most engrossing detective tales of them all.

Tone-wise this owed a lot to 1997's L.A. Confidential; its combination of femme fatales, smokey police stations and low-light interrogations making it an often overlooked highlight in Rockstar's back catalogue - mostly because they only stepped in to help Team Bondi, rather than code from the ground up.

What Doesn't?

With such medium-expanding tech, Team Bondi quickly realised their budget had been spent entirely on mapping faces, rather than where it perhaps mattered most: Gameplay.

As such, though your suspects would sit and squirm convincingly, actually talking to them caused main-man Cole Phelps to explode if you chose to pressure someone, only to zap back into a "Please continue, ma'am"-mode, the next second.

It created an incredibly scattered and broken sensation to how these scenes played out, forming the basis for gameplay that then went into terrible story elements involving the death of Phelps, ending on a forced sad note the game hadn't remotely earned.