Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded

The Good
The music is jazzy and fits with the game look and feel. Funny. Clearly made with a lot of love.

The Bad
The graphics are mediocre. The interface is outdated. Confusing puzzles. Can be tiresome at points. Not a real challenge for those who played the original game.

The Bottom Line
I was a backer for the Leisure Suit Larry Kickstarter back in the day. In fact, it's the first Kickstarter game I've ever backed up. As a Sierra On-Line veteran, I couldn't let Al Lowe down by not chipping in reviving one of my childhood most fond memories.

But then again, when I last saw Larry it was over two decades ago. Everyone is familiar with the feeling of meeting an old buddy after years of absence, and then suddenly discovering that all you have to do together is talk about your past. Well, that's how I summarize my experience with Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded.

A remake of the first Leisure Suit Larry game, released at '91 - well, technically, the first LSL game was released at '87 and in `91 saw it's remake, but Reloaded is definitely based on the remake and not the original game - Reloaded takes place in Lost Wages, which is a parody of Las Vegas. The titular protagonist is Larry Laffer, a geeky, balding, 40 something years old and still a virgin. His quest in Lost Wages is to find love, or at least lose his virginity.

Faithful to the city it spoofs, Reloaded allows you to gamble around town, and in fact demands you doing so. Moving between locations in the city costs money, which can only be obtained by playing games of luck spread throughout the game world in the form of electronic gambling machines. Most of your playing time, especially if you never played the originals, will be spent in front of the these machines, desperately saving after every buck you make or restoring when losing.

All of the girls from the original game are here, plus a new one. When you do meet a girl, you need to perform a series of fetch quests for her. When you're done bringing her all of the stuff she wants, you can "get it" with her. Don't expect much, though. Larry games were never about showing you the hot-stuff.

The puzzles in the game aren't very hard, but most of them lack common sense. They're also pretty similar to the original game, which is for me a bit of a let down, as some parts of the game I managed to complete solely by remembering what I did decades ago.

Resolving puzzles in the game would've been more intuitive, or at least more entertaining, if it wasn't for the god awful, 90's Sierra game, interface. I actually did not remember how bad the interface actually was.

First of all, there aren't any hot-spots in the game, so prepare for a lot of pixel hunting. Second, for every action Larry can perform there's a separate icon in the interface. Even walking has it's own icon. Click on an object with the wrong icon and you might get a funny comment from the narrator, but certainty not the action you aimed for.

There was an attempt to improve the interface by introducing an action wheel, but it feels rushed out and inconvenient. In fact, Full Throttle, a LucasArts adventure game from 1996, did a far-better job with the action wheel concept.

The game is funny, there's no doubt about that. Josh Mandel, who worked for Sierra for many years, wrote the game dialogues and lines, and did a very good job. Almost everything in the game is intractable, and most of the interactions will reward you funny jokes and sexual innuendos. There's no doubt that this game was made with a lot of attention and love from it's creators.

Reloaded is an adventure game, so I did not expect splendid 3d visuals and scenery. Still, the level of graphics in the game is pretty mediocre, for a 2013 title, to say the least. The game screens, and there aren't many, are colorful but overall look static and lifeless. The characters are hand-drawn and look OK, but again - adventure games in the 2000's featured better looking characters and animation.

The music in Reloaded is very good. Larry games always had that jazzy vibe, and this remake is no difference. There are a lot of memorable scores in the game, and if you pledged enough money you can download the soundtrack from Replay Games website. The sound is also great. Everyone are voiced, and the guy who voices Larry is the same one who voiced him in Larry 6 and 7.

For me, Reloaded is nothing more then a redundant trip down to memory lane. It's true that the game can be entertaining at some points, mostly due to the game's sense of humor, but it still cannot overshadow the frustration from the monotonic gambling sequences, the terrible interface and illogical puzzles.

If you're over 25 and played the original game, you might get a kick of nostalgia when playing the game (good luck finishing it if you're running strictly on nostalgic fumes, though). However, if you did not play the original series or any other game from the Sierra library, I sincerely recommend on moving away from this title. If you crave for adventure games, there are far better then this one.