Platform Reviewed: Xbox 360
Difficulty: Normal

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to say I found a game funny. It’s been even longer since I actually laughed out loud toward one. Eat Lead begins with an achievement unlocked for starting the game… It’s Hazard Time and laugh number one is out of the bag!

Find out what else lies within the mysterious bag, after the jump!

I’ve truly never wanted to love and hate any game so much at the same time as I did playing through Eat Lead. Let’s start with the gameplay itself.

The game comes pre-packed with all of this console generation’s fave mechanics – a cover system, headshots that kill in one shot, and a true feel for each weapon used. The cover mechanic is clever too:  as seen in Wanted: Weapons of Fate, the game lets you move automatically from one point of cover to the next. All you do is point your crosshair at a surface, hit the Y button and Matt will strafe/run/roll over to said surface.

You also have the ability to move around corners whilst in cover, allowing you to keep yourself out of harm’s way without having to detach from cover, strafe around and dive back into safety. So, cover works quite effectively here, hence my overuse of the word “cover” within this first part of the review. It’s nothing new really, and it occasionally gets a bit glitchy but overall it serves it’s purpose well.

The OTS view (Over The Shoulder, for those not into your acronyms), has become another standard of any third-person game in this generation, and once again this game does it well. It does it well mainly because – like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on PS3 – it allows you to alter which shoulder you’re looking over with a click of the right stick. This is indispensable whilst going around sharp corners and really needs to be put into other OTS games too. It essentially means you NEVER need to over-expose your vulnerable virtual body parts to gunfire whilst trying to look around something. Always a plus in my opinion.

The game starts off sensibly enough: you get a pistol, you learn to shoot an enemy, you learn to melee attack and so on and so forth. This accounts for the entire first level. At the end of this level you’ll come across your first boss fight. After questioning whether said boss knows the script well enough Matt will enter a QTE (Quick Time Event for those same peeps I mentioned earlier). Three rounds of button presses later and the boss is dead. Be warned though, one mistake equals death and a re-load.

You’ll then head through to the next room where a new character enters the mix ready and waiting to kill Mr Hazard, so sayeth the mighty script! Apparently, unknown to Matt, this guy is supposed to kill him and take his place as the hero in an exciting plot twist! Realising that he has no lives left, Matt has to beat him and break the script or face a less-than-glorious death sequence from which there is no return. It’s Hazard Time, and Matt fights back with the help of the friendly programmer (in the real world), QA.

The whole game follows this premise, Matt fighting for his survival against every old enemy from every game he’s ever been in, plus a few random others. It’s all being programmed by order of the game company’s CEO, a spiteful man who wants Matt to die for being the star of video games he could never beat as a child.

Yes, the story is ridiculous but that’s where it shines in this case. It’s so ridiculous, it’s hilarious! Along the way you’ll hear all of Matt’s catchphrases over and over and over and over and over again, to the annoyance of both player and QA. You’ll fight warehouse workers with pistols, brightly coloured soldiers with water pistols, 2D Nazis and a bunch of heavily-armoured space marines.

The boss fights range from mad Russian generals trying to launch nukes to a Japanese RPG stereotype who packs a giant sword, only speaks using speech boxes and attacks only after selecting it from a turn-based menu. You’ll come across friendly characters as well like Matt’s old sidekick from his glory days, for example, as well as other helping hands like Master Chef, Captain Carpenter – who apparently escapes dangerous situations by punching a box in the air and jumping down a big green pipe – and there’s also Bill the Wizard, who talks remarkably like a certain captain of the Starship Enterprise. Oh yes, there are parodies aplenty.

The whole game is packed with in-jokes that will appeal to virtually all gamers, especially those of us who’ve been going at it since the early 90’s. And the best part is that the achievements are part of the hilarity. Aside from the initial achievement for starting the game, you’ll get one for pausing. At the end, the game apologises for there being no multiplayer and gives you an achievement as a way of saying sorry! I could go into a lot more detail in all of these aspects but I don’t want to give too much away (and believe me, I haven’t).

Eat Lead is a rare gem in an otherwise humourless (for the most part), industry. The gameplay itself is nothing new, at all, but it works despite it’s highly generic nature. To be brutally honest, I might’ve felt compelled to stop playing if it weren’t for the story and all the funnies therein. The humour is what drives this game, and it drives at bajillion miles an hour.

The lack of multiplayer options and the relatively short campaign should put anyone off buying it, as it did me, but it’s easily worth a rent. You’ll be a better person for experiencing this anomaly in the gaming industry.

However, despite my high praise of the story and comedy, the generic gunplay combined with average graphics make it difficult for me to grant the full two stars unless I preface that decision with a condition; rent it or wait for the price to drop significantly prior to buying it. There. Condition expressed. Now I can go ahead and grant Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard…

Two Stars

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