Leisure Suit Larry was one of the most beloved series of the golden age of PC adventure games, but like many other point-and-click favourites, Larry Laffer effectively died when the genre suffered a sharp decline. Unfortunately, Vivendi decided to go all Weekend at Bernie’s with the IP in 2005 with Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, a reprehensible mix of simplistic mini-games and poorly written teen sex comedy starring Larry’s nephew, Larry Lovage. Somewhere along the way, Worms developer Team 17 got involved in producing a sequel, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust. Despite almost being lost forever in the Vivendi/Activision merger, the game was picked up by Codemasters (along with the rest of the Leisure Suit Larry rights). Sadly, a new open-world gameplay design and a cast of well known voice actors aren’t enough to counteract the new Larry’s absolutely atrocious dialogue, pathetic jokes, mountain of technical issues and all-round banality.

Larry Lovage is a slacker summoned to an adult movie studio run by his legendary uncle, Larry Laffer, for a bit of summer work. The senior Larry has an ulterior motive, in that he needs his nephew to sniff out a rat among his staff who he believes is involved in a plot to bring down his studio. Well, at least that’s what one can ascertain; Box Office Bust’s storytelling is ham-fisted, full of atrocious dialogue and jokes that fall flat on their face. It seems like the writer shoehorned in as much obscene material and tired jokes as he could, leaving behind a barely legible mess that’s not even remotely funny. There’s no sense of subtlety in Box Office Bust’s comedic arsenal, it’s always front and centre – for example, one of the rival producers is called “Anus Productions”.


Team 17 managed to put together a decent cast for the game, including Artie Lange, Dave Attel, Patrick Warburton, Jay Mohr, Allen Covert, Josh Keaton and Shannon Elizabeth, with “Hey Now” Hank Kingsley himself, Jeffrey Tambor providing the voice Larry Laffer. Then again, those actors are completely wasted on a horrific script, and the money spent getting said name talent could have been used to polish up other sections of the game.

Once you arrive at Uncle Larry’s movie studio, you will be ordered around to do a bunch of extremely mundane tasks consisting of the usual stuff that uninspired open world games throw at you, like fetch quests, race missions and a few basic puzzles, though this time they’re all gussied up in an obscene wrapper (for example, the first mission has you washing crudely drawn phallic images from the side of a building). These missions are broken up with the occasional mini-game, like opportunity to chat up a number of voluptuous women (to take them back to young Larry’s trailer for carnal activities) or direct the final scene of dream-sequence based movies. The former are inexplicably easy, while the latter proves to be rather difficult. Don’t be fooled though; not a single portion of it is entertaining. The open world style of gameplay ends up proving to be more of a hindrance than an asset; one gets the feeling that the game could have benefitted from a tighter, linear focus.


Being dull is one thing, but being dull and aggravating is another. See, Box Office Bust has a tremendously awful control scheme, which is further amplified if you’re not playing with a game pad, thanks to awful key assignments and ridiculously sensitive camera control. The game requires a lot of platforming, but Larry handles like a bad shopping trolley, which doesn’t really give you the level of finesse that the game demands. Larry’s command priority is completely out of whack when it comes to jumping, often sending you into a wall jump when not intended. Combat can be fidgety and the best of times and incredibly unresponsive at the worst, but it’s never entertaining or satisfying. Driving sections provide precious seconds of amusement, giving you the opportunity to run over the workers of the studio, but any excitement is short-lived. When you have control over the game’s camera, it’s an incessant nag, but for some reason the developer saw the need to relieve you of that control in the game’s interiors, which is supremely annoying.

Box Office Bust employs a visual style that’s sort of a mix of the VGA-era Larry games and cartoons from the earlier part of the 20th century. The game’s environments look nice as a result, but the characters look kind of odd; they have really large bug eyes, and the exaggerated features don’t seem to gel that well – that’s really bad for a game that’s counting on you to ogle its ladies. There’s also a high level of delayed pop-in which makes the weird looking characters downright scary at times. The primary issue with the game’s visuals is the lack of optimisation; it’s running on Unreal Engine 3, but it’s more demanding on your hardware than many of the better looking UE3 games. Our test rig (E8400, Radeon 4870, 3GB DDR2 RAM) could run the game reasonably well at high settings and the highest supported resolution, but as the game got to its later stages, it become increasingly choppy. Team 17 had an extra six months to get this right, but all it really shows is that the PC version was an afterthought.


Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is dreadful and unnecessary. Here we have a game that attempts to be risqué by throwing any sense of subtlety out the window, instead attempting to get its laughs by incessantly inserting cuss words into every sentence and making frequent references to just about every vulgar thing you can think of, rather than constructing actual jokes. The characters suck, the gameplay is repetitive and broken, and the technical side of things has been totally botched. I’m positive that this game was only published as a requirement of Codemasters gaining the Leisure Suit Larry IP from Activision – we can only hope that they show the property a little more respect in the future.