Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

"Max shouldn't have returned..."

Okay. First, let me start off by saying this game is awful. I'll get into reasons in a bit, but if you are just looking for a thumbs up/down, this gets a thumbs down.

Why did I bother playing it? Think of it like a turd but you think there's candy on the inside. So you munch on it expecting the candy (er at least I would).

Intro

Taken right off of Wikipedia:
Eat Lead: the Return of Matt Hazard is an action game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game was developed by Vicious Cycle Software and published by D3 Publisher.

Matt Hazard pits players in the role of the title character, a "legendary" gaming hero who is "returning to glory" in a new video game, some 25 years after his debut game and 6 years after his last game. In reality, the Matt Hazard character is in his first video game, with a history made up by D3 Publisher to chronicle the character's rise and fall in popularity. The Return of Matt Hazard marks Hazard's fictitious "comeback" to the gaming scene.

Gameplay

So you play as this gruff tough guy named Max Hardon. This game is a third-person duck behind cover with blindfire and aim fire kill everyone type game. You have various 'run to other cover' or dodge manuvers behind the cover. You can melee opponents, get powerups like freeze bullets or get increased damage, grenade em, or just shoot em.

So at this point I thought "wow it couldn't be that badly done" but it can. The shooting feels really weird to control, the crosshair feels too low, the moving is awkward, and yeah. This game suffers from it's biggest problem of monotony. Sure there are different environments, sure there are different looking bad guys, sure there are some different guns. But THE ENTIRE THING is just room after room with waves of these baddies and you have to take care of them. Note that this isn't always a bad thing in arcade type games (like Smash TV or Time Crisis), but it just gets overly repetitive in Eat Lead. None of the environments are very interesting either.

Graphics are fine. Music is fine.

Why ranting on this game

This game did something I would have expected to have seen earlier, in that Eat Lead is sort of a parody to video games. A Last Action Hero to games maybe. There are moments when the game is self aware-ish, such as when Matt complains that he can't jump and complaining about loading screens. ***spoilers*** There is even a fight where Matt fights a stereotypical JRPG guy and makes fun of the text dialogue. The boss also fights using a turn based RPG style attack system. This part is actually why I decided to get the game.***endspoilers*** Although the humor may not be to your liking, I found it somewhat amusing. But the cutscenes are divided by long, tasteless, and repetitive combat.

This is where that AVGN esque analogy comes in. My friend told me it was a parody of video games, so I thought they could do a good job with that. I get the game, we play it for a while, and we both hated it. Why? Because it offered something so new and refreshing to the table but was actually complete crap. In other words, the plan was great but the execution was terrible. If I hear about some bad game, I won't even bother with it because I can tell it's horrible before I play it (it has to be really bad, I'm generally open with playing different games because I might really like some slightly above average game), but I wanted to give this a chance.

If I did it

This game would be a lot cooler if it had more parody and less mindless shooting. Also, I would've changed the gameplay through the different levels. There could be an MMO level, a shooter level, a 2D platforming level, a 3D platforming level, a racing level, a turn based RPG level, etc. It could parody each genre along the way while changing up the gameplay and interface.

Final thoughts (heya bcg)

Yeah so this game sucks. It was a good idea, but it sucks. I think the developers knew this game was bad, because they seem to be aware about other aspects of the game. In fact I know they know this game is terrible. That's probably the biggest joke of all. The joke was on the players this whole time. Pretty brilliant developers, but very cruel.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/23/09

Game Release: Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (US, 02/26/09)