Lula 3D Review

The Lula 3D box displays a picture of the titular heroine perched atop satin sheets wearing a bikini and stockings, along with an assurance that the game features "Bouncin' Boobs Technology". In other words, it informs you exactly what type of game it is before you've even opened said box - an "erotic" adventure aimed squarely at 12 year old boys.

The problem is that the box doesn't also tell you that Lula 3D looks and plays like it was developed by a 12 year old boy, on a 12 year old PC, at least 12 years ago. Nor does it warn that every minute spent attempting to play the game will make you feel like you've just lost 12 years of your life, and leave you wishing that you had some kind of mind bulimia so you could sick it all up and start again.

Lula, for those who aren't familiar, first made her appearance back in 1998 in a game called Lula: The Sexy Empire. A sequel, brilliantly titled Wet Attack: The Empire Cums Back, was released a year later and a variety of spin-offs followed, including Lula Flipper (a pinball game that's nothing to do with dolphin sex, disappointingly).

Now the blonde bombshell is back, sporting even less clothes and looking more like Pete Burns than ever. Lula now produces her own porn films, apparently, and the game begins in a Beverly Hills mansion where shooting is just about to start on her next movie.

Naked truth

Nice ass, shame about EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE ENTIRE GAME.

Only problem is, the film's female stars have been kidnapped. Actually, that's not the only problem; there's also the fact that it's up to you to locate them by completing a series of increasingly tedious point-and-click tasks, all the while putting up with dreadful controls, appalling frame rates and laughably poor dialogue.

It all starts to go wrong from the very first cut-scene, which climaxes with the utterly unhilarious image of a dog humping a fat man's leg. Then the game kicks off and it's time to start exploring the mansion, and to discover that the control system is just plain rubbish. You can make Lula look around with the mouse and move using the keyboard - but don't try to do both at once, oh no, or she'll start lurching in the wrong direction and wandering into walls with wild abandon. Hopeless.

Lula also walks around at an extremely slow pace, and as shapely as she may be, we defy even the most ardent fan to find gazing at her scantily-clad torso fun for as long as it takes for the woman to walk up a flight of bloody stairs.

If you do have the astonishing level of patience required to keep going, you'll get to meet and greet some of Lula's fellow porn stars - many of whom are engaged in some of the most poorly animated sex scenes we've ever had the pleasure of. Whatever "Bouncing Boobs Technology" is, it needs to be thrown in the bin.

Familiar faces

Lula forgets to put some clothes on before popping down Threshers again.

To make matters worse, the developers haven't even bothered to make the porn stars look at all different from each other - the lady wandering topless by the pool is identical to the lady enjoying a nice time with the man on the patio furniture, and to the two ladies taking a shower together in the bathroom. Now, no one's saying that unique characters would have improved the game a great deal, but considering it's been in development for nearly four years you'd have thought they'd have made the effort.

Or at least made the effort to make the puzzles logical, rewarding and generally entertaining - but no. Some are just ridiculously easy; for example, the video player doesn't work, but OH LOOK, there's a video cable on the floor RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT. Others are ridiculously obscure, involving no kind of thought process but simply requiring you to wander aimlessly around for ages until you stumble across some obscure object. Utterly tedious.

The game's presentation is terrible, from the hideous music to the stupid cut-scenes to the way that Lula somehow manages to store every item she picks up - keys, beer bottles, porn mags, you name it - in her already rather full bra. The voice acting is worse than you'll have seen in most porn films, if you like that sort of thing, and the poorly translated dialogue just makes matters worse.