Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (PS3)

[aruljothi]

Release Date: 03/03/2009
ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
Genre: Action
Publisher: D3 Publisher
Developer: D3 Publisher

You might think that Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is a comedic parody of action games. It incorporates the voice talents of Will Arnett (Arrested Development, Semi-Pro) as the titular hero and Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog) as his archnemesis, and the plot of the game focuses on washed-up game hero who's an amalgamation of Mario (in prolificacy), Duke Nukem (in attitude), and a generic, bald space marine (in appearance). But the only real laugh in this game comes in the opening introduction (which you can watch in its almost-entirety here). The rest of the game is a plodding, boring mess that that forces you to play through the worst shooter genre clichés, and then asks you to laugh simply because the game's creators self-referentially point out how annoying those tropes are.

Comedy is hard to get across -- regardless of the medium -- and games like Sam & Max are the rare exception rather than the rule. But Eat Lead seems actively bent on making you not enjoy yourself. The monotonous combat with relatively limited weaponry against hordes of cloned enemies makes the game's six-to-eight hour play-time feel like 20. But one of the most grievous sins is Matt Hazard's repetition of the same stock phrases throughout the entirety of the game -- which I'll use as subheadings.

Your enemies include an assortment of characters from Matt's storied videogame past, including: zombies, cowboys, Russian soldiers, space marines, 2D Wolfenstein-like Nazis, and armored commandos wielding water-guns. But there are only two or three palette-swapped versions of each type, and you fight so many of each group in every level, that fatigue sets in after just a few levels. The game throws in a few generic black-suit wearing thugs and some hard-hat construction workers to attack you every now and then as well, but they all attack with the same coordinated stupidity. Your enemies' primary strategy is to shoot at you from a distance while sticking conspicuously out of cover so you can get an easy head shot. Occasionally they rush you, but that seems to only happen when the fiends can't find cover elsewhere. Sometimes it's not so bad, cause they'll come up and just stand next to you for a bit, maybe fire a shot or two, and wait for you to put a bullet through their cranium.

But despite their lack of any discernible intelligence, the thugs still get in some cheap kills -- mainly because the game's cover mechanic is so erratic. Eat Lead adds a nifty feature that lets you peek over your current hiding place, select, and automatically run to a new spot. But that feature only works intermittently -- sometimes you can select a distant object, most of the time you can't. But even just standing next to a wall and trying to take cover can be useless -- inconveniently, the "take cover" button is also the "leave cover" button. Only one of them works consistently -- I'll let you guess which one.