Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

For a second or two I actually thought this game was funny. Starting it up I remembered the old PC days when Leisure Suit Larry was a good game. When the humor was spot on and where the sexual references was tastefully done. Larry had class and the game had fun and classic point and click mechanics.
For a second I thought I saw that glory in this game. The humor kinda works a couple of times and its easy to get fooled for an hour or two.

But then its hits you like a bomb. The game is a hybrid of a Point and click, a GTA clone, a platformer, a 3rd person action game, a railshooter, a racing game and a minigame collection. And its terrible in every aspect. The open world GTA stuff feels like its only dragging out to the parts you want to play and the platforming is insanely unprecise. Larry will jump super stiff, jump into invisible walls, get stuck in the geometry, jump in the wrong direction for no appearant reason and miss easy jumps because you cant line up the jumps good enough. The shooting is terrible. Both the on rails stuff and the 3rd person shooting feels icky and slimy to play. Its just another tacked on mechanic like the rest of them. Driving cars will have you running into everything around you since its impossible to steer.

On top of this you run around this free roaming studiolot and finish tasks for people. They are often on a timelimit and just as often completely robbed of any guidance. At one point you have to find 11 clues scattered around rooftops and hidden in buildings and the only thing it tells you is to find them. You might have to spend your whole time limit just to find a way onto that first rooftoop. Jumping around with these crappy platforming controls to try and get onto another rooftop that leads you onto the right one. This is a recurring problem. The game will tell you to do something and its entirely possible to start running in the wrong direction.

The game has a couple of elements in its presentation that gain some charmpoints with its cartoony over the top style. But overall it looks like a trainwreck in motion. These guys licensed the Unreal engine and had no idea how to work with it. Muddy textures, the worst screentearing I´ve seen in years, excessive texture pop in, wierd textureartifacts and horrific character design. The characters in Box Office Bust looks like deformed, scary mutants rather than cartoony cute humans.
The music will get on your nerves the second you turn on the game. The voiceacting is passable but its the things that come out of their mouths that will get to you.
This is without a doubt some of the foulest language you´ll ever hear in a videogame. References to really dirty sexrelated things are in every sentence and they cross the line with so much the line isnt even visible anymore. But hey, that could work. Sexual language can be very funny if done right. In this game however its done WRONG !
The nudity however is very tones down. You´ll see crazy revealing clothing but compared to Magna Cum Laude its the language that is the main "sexfactor" in Box Office Bust.
So the game dosen´t even work on the Virtual Boobs level either. A level I´m usually very into. The girls here are crazy deformed and dosen´t show their assets out in the free enough for it to be a selling point for a Larry game.

In the end you might feel you want to rush through the game in 5 hours and get some easy achievements..but the thing here is..the game has only just started after 5 hours. You´ll get stuck, do annoying sidemissions and run around alot..
Go back and play Magna Cum Laude or go even further back and play the old PC classics. I really wanted to believe in this one but its not worth even the reduced price to try and plow through all of this frustration and tacked on game machanics that try to form some kind of enjoyable game.