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.