Looking around my room, I notice that I have a pretty extensive DVD collection, loaded with a great variety of different films. But nothing picks me up more than digging into a superb action film, one that sometimes defies the laws of physics and just gears up to have a good time. Surprisingly, I own neither of Michael Bay's over-produced Bad Boys movies, although there are sequences in both films that I utterly enjoy watching again and again. It's not Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bantering on between shooting the bad guys that hooks me. Oh, no. It's the first film's finale shootout in an airplane hangar, followed by a raucous car chase on a runway that ends with a phenomenal crash. Or the sequence in Bad Boys II that shows the cops driving down a mountainside in a Hummer, rampaging through a village of crack houses in the process, damage be damned. That's the kind of thing I was hoping would show up in the Bad Boys: Miami Takedown game, in development for well over a year.

Well, surprise. The game's finally arrived, price bargained and all, and what do we get for our wait? A flat tire of a game that can't even live up to the name of Bad Boys. Hell, at this point, I don't even think it could live up to the name of Horrid Boys With Warts. This game is lacking in so many directions, it's not even funny. You play through it and wonder in amazement if the development team, Blitz Games, was even trying to accomplish something different. But, alas, that's IF you can tolerate it for more than half an hour before yawning and becoming discontent with its inane lack of anything fun.

The game focuses on a plot revolving around the two Bad Boys themselves, Mike Lowery and Marcus Burnett. They're two different types of cops- Mike's a player and Marcus is a family man- who've been paired together to bring down a slew of bad guys their way. That means no interrogations or arrests, just simply walking into a room and blasting away like they do best. Now, this would fit a game just fine if it wasn't for the fact that Miami Takedown lacked so much in the execution.

The gameplay is the first thing that's out the window, and that's the primary thing that would make an action game work. The clunky controls prevent any sort of real accuracy in aiming, and the game also keeps a bad balance between shooting the hell out of enemies and hiding behind objects to keep your precious health from being depleted. I'll give you an example. Say you're hiding behind an object, right? It's in third person view. Then you step out to take out your target, and you switch to first person to take down the bad guy. Problem is, you have to ADJUST your aim to hit them, leaving yourself wide open for damage. And this is just on the basic bad guys, complete with repetitive AI that sometimes even lacks logic. Just wait until you get to one of the uneventful boss battles, where the fight is so insanely cheap that you wonder if hunting down the particular cartel is worth the reward that, in fact, you won't be receiving.

Then you've got the game's presentation, which is little to speak of. The graphic engine used here is your run-of-the-mill third-person set-up, complete with lacking camera following (sometimes it gets so close to your character you can't even see enemies) and occasional slowdown and glitching that make you wonder if you have a beta copy on hand. The stage design isn't that great, only giving you a specific amount of places to hide and not really allowing for any sort of exploring- just places to stand and shoot and then move and shoot some more. Also, it's kind of odd that the game has the Bad Boys license and yet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence don't even resemble themselves. And that's not to mention some of the laughably bad models of the bad guys in the game. Ugh.

Then you have sound, and a whole new insulting chapter has been opened here. Aside from the game's unmotivated music soundtrack and generic sound effects, which can't even vary too much in different gun types, the game developers have also employed soundalikes for Smith and Lawrence that fit the parts decently, but are fitted with dialogue so poorly written that it makes the film's scripts look like Shakespearean work. Apparently, profanity and some racial comments are the pick of the litter, but some of the dialogue is so cheesy it sounds like it doesn't even fit. It's meant to follow the tone of the movies, but it fails to even come together as a parody piece. Awful.

Throw in the lack of online features (like I said, this isn't the game you want to be hanging around online with) and no real additions to come back to once the game is completed, and you have a game that can't even live up to its $20 price tag. Bad Boys: Miami Takedown is one of the worst movie-licensed games to roll onto shelves in quite some time, with nothing really going for it except the hopes and dreams of whomever produced it that it will somehow make a killing off of fans of the movie. Don't be played like that. Avoid Miami Takedown like a bad sunburn and go watch the movies instead.

Our Final ScoreTerrible

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