Reader reviews for Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work

The art and interface have been revamped. The new look for Larry is a matter of taste, I personally had no issue with it. The interface is now standard point and click.
The major problem with the look of the game is an unbelievable amount of asset reuse. The limo, airplane, and airport repeat over and over again. There is almost no music and very few sound effects. The whole thing looks like it could fit on a couple of floppies. It would be acceptable for a fan game, but this is supposed to be a production-quality game, and it’s really not.
The writing is still up to par but the game is so short and there are so few locations it doesn’t make up for the lack of content.

Unlike previous games, it’s impossible to die (or at least, I was unable to). You can again reach a dead end but due to the game structure, these don’t require a lot of backtracking and are quite obvious when hit.
The game is divided into several short segments. Unlike previous games, “getting the girl” is trivial. The Larry segments consist of a puzzle to get to the right place (always the same puzzle), the girls are usually quite willing, so the only challenge is in maxing your score, since there are sometimes two or three ways to go about things, some worth more than others.
This is not a fair challenge, though, as often you would have to know what’s about to happen to figure out the better approach - it’s impossible to know how many times the “speech” icon can be used before you’re moved to the next scene, unless you’ve just reloaded a saved game.
There are no puzzles - some obstacles, but they’re all extremely localized (no object re-use between segments) and your inventory usually has one or two items to try with the one or two interesting hotspots in the screen.
The Patti segments are better designed. Your motivation is clearer and there’s at least some feeling of accomplishment beyond “remember to turn on the camera at the right time”.
Still, the game is unreasonably short, with the longest section being a video poker sequence that was clearly thrown in as padding. There is no sexy twist like the “liar dice” game in LSL 7 - this is more reminiscent of playing blackjack to earn money in LSL 1. You have to save-scum and the interface is awkward, and the whole thing is boring and silly. Also the payouts are ridiculously wrong: you get 3 on 1 for making a set, for instance.

Overall, there’s no real reason to play this game. It’s not challenging, it’s not interesting, the “cut scenes” are awkward paced and the few good jokes just aren’t worth the hassle. Since the series doesn’t really have a plot arch to speak of, you can as easily skip this as you probably skipped part 4.