For some reason, the developers at Team17 and the publishers at Codemasters (by way of Funsta) decided that the old formula; a collection of semi-sexual mini-games, was not suitable for the newest iteration of the Leisure Suit Larry series, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.  Instead, they’ve turned it into a linear 3D platformer, and in doing so, have essentially lost everything that made LSL the least bit charming.  If they had crafted a decent, functioning platformer out of it, this ill-advised move would be at least excusable.  If only…


Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust puts you in the comically oversized shoes of Larry Lovage, the star of Magna Cum Laude and nephew of the original Leisure Suit Larry, Larry Laffer.  While there’s plenty of raunchy bedroom humor to be found, this time around, Larry’s main goal isn’t to score with every girl in the game.  Instead, he is tasked with finding a mole who has infiltrated his uncle’s movie studio before he can expose the studio’s secrets to the tabloids.  Somehow this is accomplished through numerous fetch quests, driving missions, and other terribly implemented missions that have no bearing on anything and don’t work right 90% of the time.  Almost all of the quests involve long platforming sequences that suffer from an absolutely terrible camera and unbearably floaty jumping controls.  You'll be hard-pressd to find a platforming game from the last few console generations with more broken mechanics than Box Office Bust.

Of course, Larry isn’t above getting himself a little “something-somethin,” so scoring with as many girls as possible is an important secondary mission.  Let’s be honest; people who go in for a Leisure Suit Larry game are expecting to be titillated by some polygonal porn.  Codemasters decided to further cut down the potential audience of this game by not showing any skin at all, despite the fact that the game is rated Mature and features non-stop profanity.  For the life of me, I can’t understand why they would do this, and I can’t understand who they were thinking was going to buy this game.  A LSL game without nudity is like a Street Fighter game without fighting; it just doesn’t make any sense, and no one wants it.

Of course, the lack of nudity might be a blessing in disguise.  The character models in Box Office Bust are some of the ugliest things ever rendered on an Xbox 360.  Team17 tried to implement a heavy-handed lighting effect to the game, and in doing so, made every character look dirty, grainy and just plain awful.  They almost look as if they’re rusting from the inside out, which is a disturbing look for a character model.  The open-world environment looks significantly better, but still not “good” by any means.  Screen tearing and frame rate issues are ubiquitous as well, cementing the awful visual presentation.

A lot of these complaints would be somewhat excusable if they were backed up by a funny script, but sadly, humor is yet another element that Codemasters and Team17 decided to remove from the game.  There are a surprisingly large amount of celebrity voice actors involved, (which could explain where the development budget went) such as Artie Lange, Dave Attel, Patrick Warburton, Carmen Electra and Shannon Elizabeth, and they do a decent job of delivering their lines.  The problem is that the lines they’ve been given are, for the most part, unfunny and crass for the sake of being crass.  There’s a fine line separating clever toilet humor and gratuitous raunchiness.  Box Office Bust manages to ignore that line completely, and reside squarely in the raunchy camp.  Leisure Suit Larry was never a series that would shy away from NSFW groaners, but this time around, no one’s laughing.  It’s just bad.

Codemasters was smart in one way when it came to publishing this game; they didn’t put their name on the cover.  Instead, they published the game under their subsidiary, Funsta.  I can’t blame them one bit, and I have a feeling that Funsta doesn’t really exist, and was created as a hiding place for this God-awful game.  Awful controls, boring missions, a terrible camera, hideous characters, and juvenile, unfunny dialogue make Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust one of the worst games in recent memory, and, if there’s any justice in the world, will mark the end of this poor, abused franchise.