Hollywood has been enamored with the aspect of unleashing natural and not-so-unnatural disasters upon big cities; from earthquakes to volcanoes to meteorites to alien invasions; there are very few situations that haven’t been envisioned on the big screen. Of course, these films are mostly for eye candy; sure, there’s character development, and political discussion on the effects, but really, these aspects are so small compared to the ability to blow up a scale model or CGI rendering of a city. Surprisingly, Hollywood hasn’t delivered us the next obvious step: what if all these events occurred on the same day? Fortunately, from the twisted mind of American McGee, we can possible see how that might be through Bad Day LA, though the game itself is extremely bad, ultimately feeling like a leftover serving from last generation console feast.
On the pitiful day in Los Angeles, our homeless protagonist Anthony, who bears not a too-dissimilar appearance and manner to Dave Chappelle’s “Tyrone†character, is simply trying to cross a busy freeway, when literally all hell breaks lose. A hijacked jet filled with zombie gas crashes into an overpass and Anthony is thrust in the spotlight by healing the wounded, extinguishing fires, and dealing with zombified citizens. As Anthony reluctantly gains charges under him and some rather useful weapons left by the overwhelmed military, despite the fact that he just wants to get the heck out of the city, he works his way through LA, avoiding the chaos of the crowds, terrorists bent on destruction, and pretty every natural disaster you could name. As Anthony works his way out, he may grab unwarranted attention, denoted as a Threat Level, much like that used by the US government for terrorism alerts. Should Anthony injury or kill innocent people, his threat level rises and people will either avoid him or try to harm him. Only by helping to heal people and control the chaos will Anthony’s threat level drop and people will be assist.
Unfortunately, the depth of the story is pretty shallow. There’s no questioning of what is being done to help the city beyond the presence of the military, no understanding of what’s happening in the rest of the world as LA is crushed by the disasters, and the like. The game is certainly a parody of real life distasters; ambulances with gatling guns, unquestioning military that give out guns freely, and so on, but it’s not really scathing, more a gentle prod at how we as a country have handled natural distasters in the past. Even the characterization is poor: Anthony has little past that we know of, and the few he picks up as companions to work through the rest of the city are so stereotypical to be easily forgotten. And given that this has American McGee’s name on it, while I’m not expecting a masterpiece, I was expecting something with a bit more bite to it with regards to story and social commentary.
Because of the lacking plot and pitiful overall feel to the game, the weaknesses of the mechanics and technology used in the game are easily exposed. The third-person shooter is rendered as if from a comic, with a lot of flat textures and rough-edged details, very similar to how ‘XIII’ looked at times.
But even with such simple graphics, the game runs rather poorly on new hardware, slowing down with even a large amount of people on the screen at times, and several graphical oddities pop up too frequently. The game was definitely written in mind for a console, despite the fact that the PC version is presently out and the Xbox version is yet to be seen; on the PC, you have no option to change the video resolution or adjust video properties to try to improve the game’s performance. There’s similar issues with sound volumes that may make voice-overs hard to hear over a background noise. The biggest problem is that the gameplay is that it presents nothing new. The game disappoints when it acts as a third-person shooter is nothing exciting and even the threat level concept is not too different from Grand Theft Auto’s ‘police attention’ level.
The idea of every possible disaster hitting LA within the course of a day could be ambrosia for big budget movie producers, but as a game, it’s pulled off in an extremely poor way. There’s a lot of different ways the game could have been improved beyond what we got.
If the game was trying to go for parody, then there needed to be more of a story and character development, which would have added more humor to match the cartoonish graphics used. On the other hand, if they wanted to really rain down destruction on the city, the game would have been better with a more modern engine like Valve’s Source, well suited to showing nearly all the disasters within the game. In either case, the gameplay is in desperate need of improvements just to make either of the above routes interesting. As such, Bad Day LA is more just a ‘Bad Game PC’ - with weak story, laughable gameplay, and antiquated technology, it’s definitely a game destined for the bargain bin.
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