I never thought a game could be so badly made, but so enjoyable.
The game is loaded with weird stuff, like the ability to give a tire iron to civilians for no reason. The threat-advisory system is pointless in that it doesn't change much beyond hurting the player constantly. The game is ridiculously easy on any difficulty, with only certain parts causing the player to die, and at that point the player dies constantly.
The AI (including civilians) are extremely biased towards the player, even if the player is rescuing them from terrorists. The combat system is weird, with weapons like the shotgun being extremely underpowered and weapons like the rocket launcher and nail clipper being useless. The player uses the fire extinguisher more often than anything else because there are countless people on fire and countless zombies to cure. The player's four buddies aren't terribly helpful, and enemies ignore them entirely.
Though the game contains everything you could possibly imagine in an apocolyptic city, there's no police force whatsoever (though there are working police force models, including SWAT guys, they never make an appearance in the game). Zombies aren't nearly as awesome as I'd imagined, and they feel more like allies than enemies because they're only actually dangerous towards other AI. The player can also easily cure zombies with the fire extinguisher rather than having to kill them, which makes fighting them pretty pointless.
One of the player's allies leaves betrays him in a weird, instant and rather unexplained way, then that former ally dies just as mysteriously. The game contains tanks, but only in one level. All of the tanks, whether they be friend or foe, just aim their turrets at the player and do nothing. The tanks don't move and can't be destroyed, they just look at the player indefinitely, even if they should be shooting at him.
The game has an ending that seems like it's going to be sad, but then it ends up being funny and happy, yet weird in that some of the characters try to maintain the sadness. It really bothered me, because the main character's friends fly away with the idea that he's surely dead, but he's alive, buried in rubble, then his hand reaches up and he says, "Bitches!", then that's the end and it rolls the disappointing credits. The character's last two lines before the end of the game were taken from cutscenes in the beginning of the game. They have absolutely no relevance to the moment at which they're used. In fact, they have NEGATIVE relevance, because they have relevance to completely different situations entirely, so when the main character says the last two lines, they're confusing and stupid.
There are a lot of signs throughout the game that are quite funny, such as movie posters for "TITANIC 2 The Revenge" and signs that make fun of the government by saying things like "Winning the War Against Nail Clippers" and "Be Good Sheeple".
There are also a lot of banners here http://www.enlight.com/bdla/html/downloads/d_b.htm that relate to the content of the game, meant to link to the home page of Bad Day LA, but that home page doesn't exist anymore, no doubt because of the game's unpopularity.
The game contains a huge array of crazy disasters (and I don't just mean technical disasters), such as terrorist attacks, meteor showers and other unlikely destructive events, all based on various fears spread by the government and the media. They're all pretty fun, with the level design perfectly matching the disaster at hand, and the AI creating a true sense of chaos. There are a few uninteresting levels that lack disasters and chaos, such as the Airport level, but most levels, such as the level in which the player mans a machine gun inside an ambulance, are full of chaos with zombies, civilians and terrorists all over the place, and the Earthquake level does a pretty good job in most areas. One thing that's surprising about the game is that everything actually links together, even if it's in a ridiculous way. After the Meteor Shower level, there will still be a few meteors around on some levels. There will also be evidence of the massive Earthquake throughout some levels after the earthquake. However, it all seems really sparse and spread out, and sometimes seems a little out of place, or doesn't seem frequent enough.
The cinematics are well-made, and occur at the beginning of every level but one. The plot isn't terribly impressive. The background of the main character seems almost non-existant. There's pretty much no explanation as to why he went from having a job to being a hobo, and it's all covered up by the real purpose of the game, which is to have the player survive a crapload of insane situations.
Jokes are sometimes extremely hilarious, but many of the jokes just aren't done properly and lose their hilarity. Some jokes are also made especially weird by a lack of sound effects, like the introduction of the nail clippers as a weapon when the airport security force tries to take the nail clippers from the main character, so he clips a nail to show how harmless it is, but the nail ends up exploding and killing all of the security guards.
I also apparently missed what "A.S.S.", the name of the Airport security, is supposed to stand for. All I know is "Airport" and "Security" could go in there.
I don't know what it is about the game, but I found it to be so enjoyable that I actually played it to the end. I rarely play games to the end, even if they're really well-made, Half-Life being one example. Generally, what happens is I play a game, then once I stop playing it for that day (I can only stand to play a game for so long), I usually never play it again because there's a more fun game on my desktop that catches my eye. However, I actually went back to Bad Day LA.
The game is extremely linear and there's pretty much no reason for exploration (in the rare moments in which it's possible) because there are no goodies to unlock. There's a million weird problems with the game. And yet, I liked playing the game from beginning to end. I just can't put my finger on it. The colorful graphics (despite their crapiness) and the fun, ridiculous characters add to the fun. Tons of AI run around and create a sense of havoc, and the amount of AI increase as the difficulty increases.
I don't know how I would recommend this game. I found it to be really enjoyable, despite the countless problems. I'm thinking that might be the only reason the game was ever even released was because it had some fun value to it. I've actually been tempted to replay some of the levels. REPLAY! That's insane.
American McGee wanted to take every fear spread by the media (with examples in the intro movie), likely or not, and put them all into a video game as an experiment on what would happen and how people would act. I'd say that it was an extremely good idea and the game does a pretty good job, but the many technical flaws of the game really kill the experience for most players, so the game has gone on either in shame or simply unnoticed.
I'd say that if you're extremely, EXTREMELY bored, and you for some reason have Bad Day LA at hand, then play it with the foresight that the game is of extremely low quality, but if you ignore it, there's a good chance you'll find it to be fun nonetheless.