Bad Day L.A. is one of those games that look like it should be pretty cool.
It’s set in Los Angeles on a day when the city gets hit with one crazy disaster
after another and it’s obviously played for laughs. It also hast game designer
American McGee’s name on the box and sports an interesting cel-shaded graphical
style. Sounds like it has potential, right? Wrong. The game’s opening cutscene
will have you immediately worrying about what you’ve gotten yourself into (and
have you trying to remember where you put the receipt for the game) when it
shows the game’s hero emptying his bowels in the middle of Interstate 10 (I’m
not kidding). Your fears will then be confirmed shortly thereafter when the
gameplay begins and you find yourself in the middle of a repetitive,
frustrating, scatological, and entirely unentertaining mess of a game. Maybe
that freeway dump was meant as a sign of things to come…
Basically the game casts you in the role of an obnoxious homeless guy who
finds that he has a deep-rooted altruistic streak inside of himself when L.A.
gets hit by one disaster after another. Terrorist attack, zombie invasion,
meteor shower, … it’s a very bad day indeed. It sounds like there’s a lot of
potential for some varied and interesting gameplay here, but in reality it just
boils down to a series of constrained and linear levels in which you shoot bad
guys and spray the others with a fire hydrant.
Making matters worse for the uninspired gameplay is that fact that a lot of
the game just doesn’t work very well:
- Aiming the guns is difficult
- Enemies constantly spawn at random, often right on top of you
- You’ll die a thousand cheap deaths at the hands of unseen shooters or cars
that come out of nowhere to run you over
- Your companions are useless and it doesn’t even matter if they die or not
- The game is downright miserly with giving you the ammo that you need to
deal with respawning enemies
I could go on even further, but I can’t think of a good reason to do so …
just as I can’t think of a good reason to recommend this game to anyone.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
38%. A bad day for L.A., an even worse day for gamers.
