Okay. First, let me start off by saying this game is awful. I'll get into
reasons in a bit.
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
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.