During Activision’s merging with Vivendi last year, intellectual properties like Brutal Legend, Ghostbusters, Riddick, Wet and Leisure Suit Larry became orphans. Codemasters picked up Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust and I must say I’m a fan of Codemasters and applauded their will to continue to expand its catalogue of games that included a few misunderstood but surprisingly good games like Overlord, Jericho and Rise of the Argonauts. Now that the game is out, can we say that Codemasters made a good move?

Absolutely not!


Gameplay

In Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, you play as Larry Lovage (Larry Laffer’s nephew) who gets a shot at being someone important after being hired by his famous uncle to work at his movie studio in Tinselwood. Soon he will realize that some evil folks are trying to wreck his uncle’s studio reputation, ruining the business in the process. For this new chapter in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise, Box Office Bust developer Team 17 decided to leave behind the adventure format seen in past Larry Laffer games to adopt an open sandbox platforming gameplay approach that sadly fails to deliver. You will constantly go from one odd job to another by accomplishing a series of mini-games, timed missions and other challenges all wrapped up in the same sexually explicit set-up that only the Leisure Suit Larry series is capable of. Despite the clever missions and mini-games offered in the game, various technical issues make them very difficult to manage and become one of the game’s many faults. How simplistic mini-games and challenges can make a game incredibly frustrating? A horrible camera, poor character physic work paired with unreliable and questionable controls that forces you to restart the simplest of missions over and over to a point where you’re wondering if you’re truly having a good time.

But what about the whole Leisure Suit charm that makes you go over the flaws and have a laugh?

As you may know, we live in a society were sexual innuendo is present almost everywhere whether is on television, movies or magazines. Back in the eighties and nineties, Leisure Suit Larry was so raunchy that it could make a blind priest see again and then make him go blind again because of its highly offensive but clever scriptwriting and storytelling. Sadly, that good old edgy attitude and originality is nowhere to be found in Box Office Bust as the scriptwriting work is unbearable and simply horrible. Add to that the technical flaws that will push you to restart missions over and over (the camera going completely off while jumping for example, the double jump mechanic that will make you fall from buildings many times) and you’ll get an extremely painful game experience. Not that the game is broken it’s just that everything feels rushed, unbalanced and unfinished. This game, like many others before, proves that you can’t rely solely on the name and hope to make big bucks if you can’t bring the gameplay quality that gamers expect. Not that I expected the best Leisure Suit Larry game ever but I certainly was not expecting this monstrosity.



Graphics & Sounds

While the visual style chosen for the game might be the only good thing to come up of all this, they don’t make up for the weird animations, unpolished character models, torn textures and the dull and lifeless Hollywood studio environment in which the game is presented. Truly, the visuals in Box Office Bust shows that not even the powerful Unreal Engine can save your butt if you don’t know how to work with it. I’m saying this because the game IS indeed powered by the Unreal Engine...


Sound wise the game is as poor as the rest of the game. The music is ultra repetitive, the non-playable characters have no speech and the environmental sounds are almost reduced to zero. However, the most disappointing part of the audio resides in the voice-over work. They took the time to get a decent number of known actors and actresses in the likes of Jay Mohr, Jeffrey Tambor, Patrick Warburton, Artie Lange (who apparently got 30k for an hour of voice-over work), Shannon Elizabeth and Carmen “I know I can act” Electra. Sadly, no one delivers one ounce of authenticity as it feels like they’re constantly reading from their notes. Plus, the aforementioned poorly written script is filled with extremely unfunny sexual-innuendo dialogues. It feels like the game was written by a bunch of ten year olds. Actually it was written by Adam Sandler’s friend Allen Covert…yeah I know he’s not ten.

Fun fact: the guy who does the voice for Larry also did Ryu Hayabusa’s English voice in Ninja Gaiden II. You can’t tell but when you find out, it’s rather disturbing.

Value

A game like this has very little value, not even for all those achievement/trophies addicts out there. Surprisingly, the game has around 25 hours worth of gameplay but even the most patient of gamers would quit easily on it. If you really, really want to give it a spin, please rent it because even with its low price tag, buying the game would be the greatest mistake you would ever make. There are far more interesting things to do with your 30 dollars, like buying the old Leisure Suit Larry PC games to remind of the good times or a bunch of Choco Tacos to wash off the bad taste off your mouth while playing another game. I feel bad to even recommend it as a rental. This game makes little baby Jesus cry.

Conclusion

All I have to say is that Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is both a disgrace and an insult to the cult franchise. Honestly, when Codemasters picked it up from Activision Blizzard, I had a little something inside telling me that these guys might be able to do something after the rather uninspiring Magna Cum Laude. I always try to find some positive beneath the negative. Unfortunately, Box Office Bust doesn’t deserve the try. It took away all the respect and love for the franchise I had left. Just like George Lucas tried to do with the Star Wars Holiday Classic, Codemasters should go out there, find all the copies, bury them in the darkest place known to man, leave it there and never speak of it again. Let’s hope that the rumored sequel is a joke.