by:	March 10, 2009

The game starts off promising enough. Apparently in the reality the game is set in, videogame characters are just like real people only living in the digital world. Matt Hazard has been around since the 8-bit days and his publisher used him up until he was sucked dry, doing crappy Mario Kart knock-offs until he was officially washed up. The company he works with gets a new leader and the guy puts Matt Hazard in a game where he is about to be phased out by a new hero, but Matt is determined to figure out a way to win with the help of his videogame character buddies. It is an incredibly ridiculous concept, and one that the developers make sure you understand so much that they pound it into your cranium. The game parodies every possible aspect of videogames, making sure that it insults your intelligence as well as throwing in corny one-liners. There is plenty of nods to popular franchises like Halo, World of Warcraft, zombie games, RPGs, Hitman and more. It uses all of these nods to gaming in conjunction with insulting the player in an incredibly incoherent story.

To help that sink in there is despair in how the gameplay and visuals are presented. The game starts out great, making fun of games that give you easy achievements. You get achievements for melee killing, shooting a gun, pausing the game, watching the intro, watching the credits, progressing through the game, and using each weapon so many times. These easy achievements are great if that is your thing, and in just a weekend of renting the game you could have every last one. Starting off strong, the game quickly takes a nose dive into the sea of mediocrity so well programmed in a mediocre matter they seem as if though they were afraid that gameplay would get in the way of their raping of gaming culture.

Despite the many locales you will play in, the game remains the same, get behind cover in Gears of War style gameplay. Oh sure there will be Japanese clubs, old-western settings, and the farthest reaches of outer space, but there is always random blocks to help you out. The cover system works a little differently than the one button control you may be used to, or at least tries to be by giving you two button press options. It works when it wants to, sometimes giving you the option to vault over cover like you would like, and other times Matt will simply run awkwardly around to the other side. It is a better way to do it than Gears in theory but it falls flat by being less intuitive, and not being able to really run. While behind cover you can blind fire, or pull the left trigger to aim, but the aiming can be very shaky, thankfully the enemies aren’t really all that inclined to move around. A very interesting aspect to the duck and cover gameplay is that some of the cover can be destroyed “in the game” if you shoot at it enough exposing even more enemies.

The AI enemies for the most part are not difficult; sticking its head, shoulders, and whatever else it can manage in to your line of sight. The enemy will get you in strength in numbers, randomly generating, and confusing mission objectives. One boss I was fighting for quite some time trying to figure out how to get over to his platform and disarm a bomb. It wasn’t until blind firing at a few enemies and a few well placed shots towards him until I actually found passage to disarm the device. You can melee attack an enemy after blind firing and take him down with one swooping punch, or tango with him strictly with close combat. The problem is, the AI doesn’t seem to know how to function in close-quarter fighting. Throughout the game, there are also sections where you have to press buttons at the right time and move the analog when prompted in a boss battle. This will initiate a slightly stylized close counter braw as Matt and his opponent verbally spar as well.

Visually the game doesn’t manage to stand out in any way. While there are plenty of locales to explore, and enemies to fight, the variation in them is nothing more than with a gun or not, and the skin which was used on the designs. Instead of bleeding when shot, the enemies in the game will spray “digital matter” since they are videogames, and the dull colors, uninspired level design, and straight parody characters shows they had plenty to go off of, just very little of it was the developers own imagination.

To the developers credit the writing is sometimes helped by Will Arnett and the guy that played Doogie Houser M.D. and when the game insults you when your trying to reload a gun but have no bullets it kind of tunes into a hardcore gamer’s frequency but it is off by a decimal. The game lacks any kind of replay value especially without any kind of multiplayer modes. It would have been interesting if you could control the Wizard character, a Ninja, Cowboy, and all kinds of other quirky characters.

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Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is the first we have ever seen of Matt, and he will be coming back later this year with an XBLA title. Let’s hope that the newly created franchise builds its own foundation instead of using the entire industry. The game has a little charm and while it can be insulting, maybe it is the best way to view how the rest of the world actually views gamers right now, specifically what the industry’s place is in pop-culture right now. If some incredibly easy achievements and it’s so-good-it’s-bad quality, Eat Lead is an excellent game to experience in a weekend rental but nothing more.

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