Verbal Abuse From Martin Lawrence Is More Fun

What the hell happened when they made this? Seriously? I remember when Bad Boys was new and it was pretty much the go-to movie for me and my friends if we had nothing else to watch.

I remember seeing this game new at the store and thinking “AWWW HELL NAWW! Why would they release this now?” Bad Boys 2 had come and gone from theaters a year before, so the timing was really weird. They should’ve released it when the first movie came out and called it a day. That was probably the least of the problems with this turd, though.

The game doesn’t really share anything with the movies and is its own self-contained story, which is good because it’s shit. Basically Mike and Marcus have to help a fellow agent, some girl whose name escapes me because she’s irrelevant, whose partner was killed by a drug lord named Mendoza. (play mendoza clip) The villains are your stereotypical colombians and there’s some russian chick that sounds like she belongs in a Bond movie. They take or sell drugs or something. It’s always drugs. If these people moved to Portland or California they wouldn’t have this problem. They aren’t really in this very much and most of the cutscenes are Mike and Marcus shit talking each other and announcing what they have to do next. As plots go, it’s thinner than Kate Moss, but then that shouldn’t be surprising. You can’t tell who’s talking half the time because neither of them sound like the actors.

It’s a linear cover-based shooter, so you’re just running and gunning from point A to point B, then you’ll get a cutscene that sets up the next level. Apparently Miami’s even more of a warzone in this than it is in real life – come at me, factcheckers – so you’re blasting your way through alleys, rooftops, your mother’s gross bedroom, crap like that. The graphics are pretty bad. It’s bland, and the stuff that was memorable in the movies wasn’t really here. No crazy nightclubs with skanks dancing all over, no car chases, though that’s probably for the best because who knows how the developers would screw up car driving. The graphics reminded me of Grand Theft Auto 3, possibly Vice City, but then once I noticed that it just made me want to play Vice City.

You’ll switch off between Mike and Marcus, though it doesn’t matter since neither of them feel any different. Occasionally you’ll get to play through some levels with one of them acting as a backup, however most of the time they’d just sit behind cover and wait for you to kill everybody while spouting off one-liners. Or get stuck in a wall because the AI partner is like that kid you knew in elementary school that ate paste. I would’ve liked to see some mechanic that lets you switch characters if one was low on health, because dying in this is really punishing.

I say that it’s punishing because there are no checkpoints in this game, save for just a couple at some boss fights. Otherwise, dying at any point, will make you restart the entire level. There’s one level in particular where halfway through, you’re given 60 seconds to find a gas mask before you die and there’s no indication of where it’s at. The environment is dark, the gas mask is dark, so it’s trial and error to find it before you die and have to repeat the level. I had to look up the location online and it turned out I was in the correct room several times, but I walked right by it because it’s almost invisible. Add onto that the graphics become fuzzier as the timer counts down, and it’s totally infuriating. Why would they do that??

Being that it’s a shooter, one of the most important things to get right is the aiming, and surprise, surprise, it’s terrible. Basically the stick moves very slowly when aiming, but push the analog for too long and it tears ass across the screen. There’s a lock-on feature, but it requires putting the crosshairs almost right on your target, then you have to hold down the lock-on button. This doesn’t guarantee a hit, though, because if the enemies run or dodge-roll, the you’ll lose your lock on them. What’s the point of including it then? Just let me lock on the stupid bad guy so I can shoot him!

I say that it’s punishing because there are no checkpoints in this game, save for just a couple at some boss fights. Otherwise, dying at any point, will make you restart the entire level.

Just running around sucks, you always feel like you’re running in water. There’s a dodge-roll to help out, and it turns out that in some parts of the game, you can just dodge-roll past enemies to get to the next section. This is what I did when I kept dying when trying to find the gas mask. After dying my 4th time I thought, “I wonder if I can just roll past everybody and get back to where I was?” and I could! I should’ve done the whole game like that. Crouching is completely useless as enemies can not only still hit you if you’re crouched behind an object, but if you try to be slick and crouch behind stairs to shoot an enemy, you’ll just shoot the stairs instead. But hey, maybe you hate stairs and think they need shooting. Maybe you work for the elevator company. I’m not gonna judge.

The weapons are dog shit, they range from your handgun to a couple shotguns, a submachine gun, and a couple types of automatic rifles. The shotguns were borderline useless as some enemies took about a half dozen shots to kill, and as slow as it is it’s more useful to just stick with your handgun. There’s a few levels where you have a sniper rifle and you’ll have to protect your partner, and those worked just fine. Also I’m an experimental type of guy, and I found that your partner gets mad if you shoot him in the head.

At the center of all this pew-pew stuff, is Mike and Marcus. A major part of what makes Bad Boys work is the dynamic between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Nobody was going to want to play a game where the characters don’t even sound like them. I mean look at the box; Smith and Laurence are even on the cover, most likely because the publisher knew the game had even less of a chance of selling without them, so any fans would’ve been disappointed if the voices aren’t even close.

There’s a ton of one-liners in this, some of which I laughed at, but most of the others felt really forced and they’re repeated a lot. When they’re both standing next to each other and Marcus is asking Mike where he’s going and asks him to come back, but Mike hasn’t actually gone anywhere, is just sloppy. The jokes in the movies were well timed and didn’t feel forced. Also both Mike and Marcus were pretty adept at investigating, and while I know this is an action game, I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of that in the cutscenes.

So to summarize my experience, I did not care for this game. Between the cat-shit graphics, the forced jokes that didn’t land about 90% of the time, the really sloppy gunplay, all the problems with the controls, this game should not have been made. If for some reason you thought it would be fun to slum it and buy this, save your money and instead replay Vice City, get some tropical fruit bubblicious, and some skittles.