
	Platform Xbox Genre Action Publisher Crave Entertainment Developer Blitz Games ESRB M (Mature) Released Q4 2004

- Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are on the cover - Might be entertaining for the most die-hard Bad Boys fan

- Linear and repetitive gameplay - Very unintelligent enemy AI - Weak graphics; more specifically the player models - Poor level structure

Review: BloodRayne 2 (XB) Review: Dead to Rights (XB) Review: Max Payne 2 - The Fall of Max Payne (XB)
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Bad Boys: Miami Takedown

Score: 3.2 / 10

Before I criticize Bad Boys: Miami Takedown, I first want to discuss the impeccable timing of the release date, which coincides with… I have no idea. The movie came out over a year ago, the DVD has been out for the past five or six months so the obvious time to release the game would be – during a time that doesn’t coincide with any other Bad Boys products. Not that this a highly critical mistake, it’s just that sometimes, when a game is released alongside a film, the game might seem that much better because of its tie-in to the movie. Bad Boys: Miami Takedown makes all of the wrong moves from the very beginning and does little to recover from its own takedown.

The opening intro to the game had me believing that maybe there was some hope of a decent game down the stretch. In the scene you hear a drug lord talking with

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one of his pawns about taking down some TNT (Tactical Narcotic Team) members.

After that, not even cinematics can save the game. The first thing you’ll notice about the game are the poor graphics. Details are hard to find with almost every object as generic as the game itself. The characters you’ll face have no distinction from one another except for

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the clothes they wear. There are some signs of life in certain areas, although the dull graphics put you out of the game fairly quickly. The cop duo themselves have no likeness to their relative actor at all. Either the artists were too busy “polishing” the graphics elsewhere, or just didn’t have the rights to the actors. Either way there is no excuse for the abysmal portrayal of the main characters.

As if it couldn’t get any worse, Bad Boys: Miami Takedown keeps on dishing out problems. The gameplay involves mostly running from wall to wall hiding behind cover, than popping out and shooting any enemies in sight. With gameplay this linear you’d think that this wouldn’t be major problems – then again, its Bad Boys. The most evident of which is because of an awkward animation. When your character has his back against the wall, he can than choose to spin and face the front, or simply back off. In the case of spinning towards the front, the camera changes from the 3rd person to the 1st person perspective and screws up everything. The aiming configuration is out of whack, and every time you switch the perspectives, you’ll get a split second animation that looks ridiculous.

Tying in with the problematic gameplay is the lack of any intelligent AI. Most of the time enemies will go and hide behind cover, whether it be a pool table or a stone wall, but after that they just stop thinking. You can walk up to one of the enemies and stand right next to him, without them even noticing you’re there.

In the sound and dialogue department, the team decided to fill it with pointless obscenities. While the ESRB states that no one under 17 should play this game, ERIC states that no one should play this game. The language may become an issue for some, so take that into consideration before playing around an adolescent. The sound effects of the guns and ambiance is standard for the most part – nothing spectacular. The voices of our two heroes are just as bad as their faces. There are no resemblances to Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.

Bad Boys: Miami Takedown is a tragedy no matter how you look at it. In this day and age, where movie-licensed games are becoming stronger and stronger each year, its disappointing to see a game like Miami Takedown on store shelves. Even if you consider yourself a Bad Boys fan, keep your money and spend it on the DVDs.

- Eric Lahiji
(November 5, 2004)