Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!

The Good
Despite its appealing looks, Larry 5 was one of the weakest adventure games Sierra has ever produced. The glory of the franchise seemed to have become a thing of the past. But the developers did their homework, learned from their mistakes, pulled themselves together, and eventually delivered a triumphant game seriously contending for the title of the best in the series.

Larry 6 is everything its predecessor was not: it is large, difficult, very funny, and rich in interaction and exploration. Discarding any unnecessary changes and experiments, the game goes back to the convenient formula introduced by the very first outing: you are given a selection of accessible areas you can visit in any order and try to woo the attractive young women populating them. Just like in the initial episode, all the puzzles form an interconnected system, where you'll need to please several female characters until you get the crucial items required for the "boss girl" and the grand finale.

Yes, Larry 6 is unoriginal, but it is often so that originality comes at the expense of quality, and - on the contrary - following a trodden path may eventually bring you to perfection. Whatever Larry 6 does, it does better than any of its predecessors. First of all, it is a big game. Its only location, a resort hotel with a spa, may come across as a disappointment after the urban exploration of the earlier games - that is, until you actually begin exploring, at which point you start noticing that the game's world is bigger than in any of its predecessors. There are various facilities, rooms, beach, outside area - and all those places are packed with items, people, and interesting things to do.

You are able to visit any area of the game world right from the beginning, which makes Larry 6 the most open-ended installment of the series. The upsides of this structure are obvious: not only you are virtually unrestricted in the satisfaction of your curiosity - you are also free to tackle the puzzles at any pace you want. If you feel you are stuck on one task, try exploring more and you're guaranteed to find something to work on. Most objectives can also be solved out of a particular order, which means that the game allows you to play it the way you want to, without forcing particular sequences down your throat and only interfering for humorous cutscenes that occur once you've successfully seduced a girl.

The puzzles have received a tremendous boost. Larry 6 has by far the best puzzles in the series so far, boasting a nigh immaculate system with convoluted, intricate tasks woven together in a clever and yet appropriately twisted, comedic way. There are even some puzzles that can be solved through different methods. Sierra decided to get rid of dead ends, and the death scenes in the game are purely for humorous purposes. They have wisely understood that the days of death-ridden, simple adventures were gone, and, after the hiccup that the preceding game was, devised a puzzle tree worthy of a competition with the best oeuvres produced by their rivals.

At the same time, Sierra kept and enhanced what always gave their games a certain edge over LucasArts' creations - interactivity and text descriptions. Larry 6 is beautifully responsive and heavy on interaction. Even the most mundane, generic actions elicit unique responses. Trying out illogical, ridiculous actions has always been one of the greatest pleasures in those games for me, and Larry 6 shines as one of the very best examples of this. There is more text than ever, longer and more elaborate descriptions, and much longer dialogues that make the game livelier, "tastier", and more energetic than the earlier entries. The humor is also back with vengeance, and the writing is generally among the finest I've seen in a comedy adventure.

As always, this Larry installment is a pleasure for the senses. The high-resolution CD version is the definitive edition of the game, with its enhanced soundtrack and crisp graphics far surpassing the somewhat blurry images of the floppy release. This version also adds, for the first time in the series, full voice-overs, which are excellent. The omnipresent narrator steals the show with his sarcastic wit.

The Bad
Larry 6 is quite unoriginal. It takes what made the series tick and doesn't attempt to breach the boundaries. What the game offers is good traditional adventure gameplay and comedy; it doesn't try to do anything beyond that. There are no political conspiracies this time, no love affairs, no KGB, no FBI, no tragic situations in which the hero should either lose his virginity or die. Just walking around in a spa, gazing at women in bikinis and scratching your head while trying to figure out how to charm them.

The designers made a conscious choice of opening the playground to you right away. The downside of this is a certain lack of dynamism. The game is very laid-back and there are no real surprises: you know you won't leave the area and there will be no new place to visit until the game ends. This also affects the plot, which is nearly non-existent: "please several women in humorously inventive ways" pretty much sums it all up. Also, I know that most people were happy that Patti was gone, but throwing her out of the series without a single hint of an explanation created an unpleasant feeling that all your previous adventures were meaningless.

The Bottom Line
Larry 6 is a splendid recovery from the preceding game's effort to knock the disco lover's crown off his balding head. Dropping all pretenses, it returns to shape by sticking to what works, clearing the field for humor, hormones, and - above all - excellent gameplay.

The Good
After the pretty but oh-so crappy Larry 5, I expected the next installment in the series to suck royaly. Fortunately for everyone, Larry (and Al Lowe) learned from his mistakes and came back in full puzzling glory and taking full advantage of the new technological advances to provide a much more extensive adventure experience. There are now 9 babes to conquer, and the spotlight is set entirely on Larry, which of course means no Patty, but lets face it folks: Larry wasn't made to be tied down with the ol' balls & chain :)

The puzzles are among the best in the Larry franchise, and there are some pretty wild ones here, unfortunately their difficulty often comes from their lack of logic (like the one were you have to make yourself a thong), but regardless of that, Larry 6 manages to be one of the best adventure games of it's time, and the digitized ending, though ripped right out of the Naked Gun, is still immensely fun to watch. As is the game to play through, with excellent comedy writing and some fantastically funny moments. Larry truly made amends with the world after the debacle of it's previous outing, and that takes a VERY good game.

The Bad
The only problem in Larry 6 comes from the same reason most of it's good points come from. It's bigger and badder than ever, thus the cliches and the re-using of the same old tired formula becomes even more evident. The plot is the same as always: get to "score" with the girls, which fortunately means to just give them a specific item (man, if it were only half as easy on real life!!), with your main objective being to nail the "ultimate" girl that requires an item you get after nailing all the other sub-chicks. Obviously, all of the adventures with the previous girls turn out rather badly for Larry, but the final chick gets to be Larry's big payoff....

Sound familiar?

The Bottom Line
Larry is bigger, badder and way more funny!! Slightly illogical and definitively unoriginal, but still funny as hell. A must for every adventure fan with a politically incorrect, and sexually active sense of humor.

The Good
A great game, Larry 6 features better graphics than either of the first, excellent background music, great jokes and great, no-bullshit gameplay. With improved inteface and game engine, the Windows version features voiceovers which are actually quite good (a lot better than in Larry 7).

The Bad
It tends to crash, and that's annoying.

The Bottom Line
A bizarre-o adventure game you gotta love.