Bad Day L.A. review

Bad Day L.A. is about as sexy as a power-walking grandpa - and the gameplay shuffles along at the same pace. See Anthony jog. Jog Anthony jog. Jog through your drab generic version of Los Angeles. Ogle at your sparse city of squiggly lines and blocky shapes (and if you were thinking you could provide some semblance of beauty by turning up the resolution, sorry, PC users, you can't). Observe how the people and objects move like herky-jerky dancers. Listen to the soundtrack of limp Hawaiian tunes and watered-down hip hop.

Hey! Stop the negativity. Remember that you've got a nice long series of linear missions to accomplish. You're not only jogging through the city of blah, you're also forever shackled to a task, usually killing terrorists or saving civilians. You've got a shotgun, machine gun, or sniper rifle, but they're all dinky. There's no weight behind them. It reduces the act of gunning down a gang of foes to a belch of "who cares."

And then it's civilian-saving time. Quick, spray that zombie woman with your miracle fire extinguisher. Yay, she's human again! That's it. Now do it again. Whee! Welcome to most of the game. Sometimes you'll live the glory of bashing in a fence with a crowbar, but the controls are so unresponsive and the visual and audio feedback so lackluster that even that makes us cry.