American McGee Presents Bad Day LA review (PC)

There's a good amount of gunplay in Bad Day LA, and you'll pick up plenty of conventional weapons, like a shotgun, an AK-47, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher. You'll also find use for a tire iron, Molotov cocktails, an absurd set of nail clippers, and a flamethrower fashioned out of a lighter and a can of hairspray. The flamethrower doesn't show up until later in the game, though you'll be glad when it does, since the other weapons are weak and ineffective by comparison. Even at point-blank range, the shotgun can require three pumps to lay out an enemy, the AK-47 has terrible accuracy and chews through the relatively scarce ammunition, and the sniper rifle never produces one-shot kills. The amount of damage your weapons do at any given time seems arbitrary, which can make the unsatisfying gunplay downright frustrating. You also gain sidekicks that are intended to help you out, though they seem to disappear at random and rarely have much impact anyway.

There are a few on-rails missions thrown in to mix things up a bit, but aside from these diversions, which offer their own set of frustrations, there is a crushing monotony to the mission structure in Bad Day LA. Virtually every mission demands that you kill a number of bad guys or rescue a number of good guys. Whenever the missions get more complicated than that, the game stumbles, because it often doesn't give adequate information about what, exactly, is going on. This can be especially frustrating during the few boss fights. Usually, you can ask friendly civilians for directions to your next objective. This causes an arrow to appear above your head, which is helpful, though the arrow fades quickly. While the game gives the initial impression that you're in a wide-open world to be explored, you'll quickly find that most levels are extremely linear in design, and most attempts to explore off the beaten path will lead you to an invisible barrier or a dead end. The game just doesn't have much to offer, and you'll probably be relieved when you reach its anticlimactic finish after just a few hours of play.

That is, if you can even get the game to run. We were unable to get past the main menu on one of our test systems, and while it ran relatively smoothly on another PC, the whole game felt cheap and shoddy. The game automatically reloads when you die, though it doesn't always load the most recent save. There are no real options for tweaking controls or graphics quality, the latter of which seems pretty well inexcusable for a PC game at this point. While the game sports an interesting visual style that evokes a sort of paranoid, hand-drawn atmosphere, it gets lost in repetitive character models, stiff animations, boxy environments, and unconvincing effects. There's also a general bugginess to the game--a smoking car chassis will fly into the air several seconds after it explodes, and civilians covered in fire will occasionally walk around as though it's 72 degrees. As unpleasant as the visuals can be, the sound in Bad Day LA seems unfinished. It's not uncommon to find yourself running around in absolute silence, though that may be preferable to any of the sound that the game has on offer. The voice acting is stifled and repetitive, the handful of different background tunes loop too quickly, and the sound effects feel flat.

That Bad Day LA is such a spectacular failure in almost every facet of its execution is really sad, since in concept it had so much potential. Even fans of American McGee's past work should give the game a wide berth. Apparently Murphy's Law isn't in effect just for the characters in Bad Day LA, but for the game itself.