It’s fair to say that L.A. Noire is one of the most anticipated releases for 2011. It’s certainly tops when it comes to new properties, which are few and far between these days. But hype can only carry a game so far, and L.A. Noire just might be reaching the end of its rope - it’s time for Team Bondi and Rockstar to show us something real. It’s now the tail end of 2010 and L.A. Noire has been in development since 2004. Six years in and no one besides the team has played this game. It has suffered multiple delays, initially aiming for a 2007 release, then being delayed until sometime in 2009. That didn’t happen. There was hope to see the title in 2010; now it’s up for sometime in the first half of next year. Maybe.

The lack of any hands-on gameplay is a cause for concern. Please remember, this is not a Rockstar production - this is a Team Bondi game, published by Rockstar. Team Bondi is a studio created by Brendan McNamara, former head of Sony’s Team SOHO studio - the team responsible for The Getaway franchise. And what was that franchise best known for? Excellent graphics, a startling recreation of London, superb acting and voice work and - wait for it - bad gameplay. GameSpot’s Greg Kasavin describes The Getaway rather presciently as an “ambitious project that reportedly cost a fortune to produce and was many years in the making.” Sound familiar?

The Getaway was heavily panned for simply poor game design - the game looked absolutely fantastic, but playing it was another story. All that development time and the game still felt rushed and underdeveloped. Usually teams use the opportunity to make a sequel to improve upon the original, but The Getaway: Black Monday was hated even more. The MetaCritic score is 15 points below the original, with the game once again being praised by the majority of critics for being absolutely beautiful, with fantastic acting and dialogue; yet, once again, “awkward gameplay” (as GamePro put it) reared its ugly head. As IGN described it: “Black Monday is better enjoyed as a show than a game.”

For L.A. Noire, all we’ve been able to do is look at videos of videos. And as we expected, Team Bondi has done a fantastic job with the presentation. We’ve all seen Aaron Staton of Mad Men fame in the screenshots and videos, wonderfully rendered with painstaking attention to detail. GameSpot got to watch a segment of the game in their latest preview, but watching experts play a game is a totally different experience from actually playing it yourself. Writing a book review based on an excerpt you read is possible; writing a book review based on an excerpt your friend read isn’t necessarily impossible, but it probably won’t be as thorough. That’s where we are with this latest preview.

And L.A. Noire isn’t a game that’s still got a lot of time in development. After numerous delays, this project is allegedly coming in early 2011. You really have to wonder why L.A. Noire has been delayed so long and I can’t help but believe that it must be to make the game actually playable. At this point in time, the press should be doing hands-on previews. Since they aren’t, there’s only one conclusion to draw: it’s broken and Team Bondi is frantically trying to make an expensive project workable. Perhaps we can count on the fact that Rockstar knows not to let their fans down and will push to make the game better, but State of Emergency wasn’t that good, either.

Forecast: L.A. Noire will be delayed until the end of 2011. Upon release, it will be praised for beautiful graphics but clunky gameplay. Early critics will give high-80s, but the average score will balance out to about a 7.5 within a few weeks of its release.