Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

You take on the role on Matt Hazard a washed up gaming action hero who's career has taken a slid recently. Like all washed up gaming action heroes you now eat and drink too much and stay at home all day watching TV. Suddenly the game developer you work for wants to make another Matt Hazard game and you jump at the chance but not everything is as it appears. It's Hazard Time!

Good Points:

Some laugh out loud moments.

A good mixture of achievements, both easy and hard.

Interesting and unusual story.

Nice selection of weapons.

Cover mechanic.

Bad Points:

Sometimes the humor isn't all that funny.

Guns feel a little bit weak.

Hit detection is off at times.

Kinda hard to gauge health.

Repetitive/copy and paste environments.

Matt Hazard is one of those games that tries to introduce humor into the mix. Sometimes it's laugh out loud funny, for example when you fight 2D Nazis (homage to Wolfenstein 3D) and they turn sideways so that you can't damage them. Another example would be when the actual game producer of the game in the real world says that he's a producer and doesn't play the games. The part that had me laughing out loud was when you have to fight a Japanese RPG style boss, complete with written dialog.

With all these great pieces of humor some of it seems a little bit wide of the mark or even forced, which I thought was a real shame.

The achievements are both easy and hard although most are easy to get. Watching the game credits gives you 60 points, completing the tutorial gives you 10 points, pausing the game gives you 5 points. So there's plenty of points to be had and after my first play though I got over 800 achievement points. The harder achievements include killing three testers with one grenade or finishing the game on Maximum Hazard mode.

Eat Lead's whole story is strange, wacky, unusual or what ever word would describe it better. It's certain not one of the run of the mill shooter stories such as Earth is in danger from alien invasion or zombies are everywhere, you know the usual kind.

Every shooter has weapons and Eat Lead is no exception to this gaming law. You are given a 9mm to start but quickly find other weapons such as the shotgun, AK47, water pistol, submachine gun, water submachine gun, plasma rifle, plasma pistol, six shooters, Magnum, grenade launcher and sniper rifle.

With this quite sizable arsenal at your disposable you only get to carry two weapons at a time and each weapon has a 50 kills achievement linked to it.

Some of the guns feel quite weak then shooting the enemies but I suppose some of this can be attributed to certain enemies having specific weakness, such as the enemies with the water guns have a weakness to water based weapons.

One of the things that becomes oblivious in some places is the hit detection being a little bit on the dodgy side. I know I shot quite a very enemies with head shots and they didn't fall down dead. Certain enemies such as the developer/tester avatars or the space marines do take more than one head shot to kill but the instances I observed were with the construction workers.

Finding cover is the order of the day especially when you crank up the difficulty level. There are crates, walls and other items strewn around each level that you can take cover behind. However you will be forced to move because if the object you are taking cover behind takes too much damage it will de-rez (homage to the film Tron). The cover system is easy to use, stand next to piece of cover to take cover or point your cross hair and press Y to go to that cover and hide behind it. You can also move around you cover and move from one piece of cover to another if the pieces of cover a close enough together. The one part of the cover mechanic that I liked was the roll over the cover you hiding behind, that effect looks great. There's nothing like have an enemy running at you while shooting and you roll over your cover and hit said enemy straight in the face with a shotgun blast...very cool!

I don't know if it's just me but Eat Lead's regenerating health system seems to make it hard to judge just how much health you actually have. When your health it low the screen washes out but it seems a little bit of inconsistency in the amount of damage you can take after the screen washes out.

Now for the most game damning thing. Eat Lead has very repetitive levels, you'll run through hallways shoot people and then come to a big room where the doors will shut and enemies and cover will appear. As soon as you see a big room you automatically know what's going to happen, an ambush. The levels are also copied and pasted for the most part, that big room you fought your way through a while back will appear later on in the level and it will appear exactly the same.

Overall Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is one of those games that just wants to entertain you while being as silly and humorous as it came be, which it does for a while but there's no escaping it's repetitive nature and it's other flaws.

After I had finished playing it I didn't feel like I wanted to play it again and that's a really bad sign.

This game is for people who want a few hours of OK game play and some humor or people who just want to get some easy achievements.

Rent it first!