Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard Review
admin | March 7, 2009 | no comments
Not since Bad Day L.A. has a game disappointed me as much as Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard did. Eat Lead isn’t even in the same ballpark of suck that Bad Day L.A. was, but both games were built on a really funny concept that I hoped would be fertile ground for the writers to satirize videogames themselves, and neither came anywhere close to delivering on that promise. Unlike Bad Day L.A., Eat Lead isn’t a complete waste of time. In fact, there are some very likable elements to the gameplay, namely the cover system which is well designed if slightly buggy in implementation (aren’t most cover systems?). The game is very challenging, imploring you to use the cover effectively, especially in boss fights that are more complex than just simple hammering away on a larger enemy. As shooters go it’s definitely B-list. By no means a must-experience, but not a completely worthless affair that will make you break out in hives. The fact that the game plays in a mostly competent manner was a bit of a surprise. Not that my expectations were low – they were actually rather quite high. But mostly for the story, which promised to be a biting satire of videogames and the cliché’s within the medium that are so ripe for skewering. A sharp, witty game that does this is something our industry needs more of. Unfortunately Eat Lead is not one of them. The concept is great. Pseudo aging video game hero comes back for one last payday only to find out that the game he’s starring in has gone corrupt at the hands of a hacker, probably someone inside the faux publisher Marathon Games. That person is trying to kill him, and keeps inserting enemies from Matt Hazard’s made-up catalog of past titles. Cast the gravelly-voiced Will Arnett (Arrested Development’s Gob) as Hazard, Neil Patrick Harris as the weasel-y bad guy and you seem to have a recipe for hilarity. Or one would think. The humor in Eat Lead largely stops with the concept. The writing throughout the game, from the dialogue to the little jokes that pepper the loading pages just isn’t up to the task of making you laugh. You’ll smirk a few times at best, but the unevenness of the approach results in a game that’s more of a broad and unrefined parody rather than a cutting satire. It’s more like the terrible Friedberg-Seltzer movies (Epic Movie, Scary Movie 1-4, etc.) but with less “jokes”. Can’t really blame Arnett or NPH here – they’re two very funny guys who aren’t given much decent material to work with. It’s just sort of amazing that a game with such a blatantly comic premise. The jokes don’t really fall flat because their aren’t that many jokes. Just instances of tired recognition. Oh, I get it, this level boss is from a JRPG and when he talks, it’s all in text boxes that take forever to read. Unfortunately nothing he or Hazard says in their exchange is really funny or witty. It just is. Again, the concept is good, the delivery is almost non-existent. It’s hard to criticize a game that sets itself up as being ironic in the first place. If I say the level design is crappy, or the shooting sucks or the enemies are stupid, all someone who made the game has to say is: “it’s supposed to be, that’s the joke”. I for one won’t be fooled. At heart, Eat Lead is the completely anathema of satire: it’s earnest. It’s actually trying to be a decent shooter. And maddeningly, it sort of is. The cover system, an ubiquitous feature in shooters nowadays, is surprisingly well-designed. Cover is not just about getting behind the closest obstacle, it’s also about chaining your moves between different cover opportunities and doing different quick moves like vaulting over your present blockade. Eat Lead also lets you change hands with your weapon to find different angles from which to shoot enemies while still in cover. It’s a little buggy, not always putting you exactly into cover where you wanted to. But most cover systems like that are. With a little polish, it could stand out over other systems like it, including the granddaddy of the concept, Gears of War. Beyond that the action can get really irritating. Exploding barrels barely explode. You have no grenades even though your enemies do and use them liberally. The weapons are fairly boring, even if squirt guns are a rather inspired choice. The special abilities you can use, fire and ice shot, add some depth to the gameplay but only about a millimeter’s worth. In essence, Eat Lead commits its biggest sin by not being all that much fun. It’s a bummer to see a game with such a great idea at its core turn into such a middling shooter that doesn’t deliver on its creative promise. Eat Lead ends up being a satire of a parody which doesn’t work. For satire, you need to have some connection to real things to make the joke. For instance, the continual jokes about his catchphrase: “It’s Hazard time.” Funny catchphrase in its own right, mainly for its intentional cheesiness, but the jokes that stem off of him using it don’t hit home because we only learned that was his catchphrase at the beginning of the game. The movie this game reminds me the most of is The Last Action Hero. In that movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger parodies himself and his roles as a cheesy action star. Matt Hazard is trying to do much the same thing in Eat Lead, the only problem is, we don’t know who Matt Hazard is, he’s made up. No offense to Will Arnett, but maybe they should have got Arnie to play the role himself. Or perhaps Duke Nukem. Just sayin’. What would have been really cool is if the game kept changing into its older iterations. Enemies from past games should look like they did in those games. The Wafferthin soldiers are straight out of an old 2D FPS, but why do the Russian soldiers from Hazard’s 64-bit era You Only Live 1317 Times look like current-gen technology? Stuff like this sort of erases the interest that you summoned for the original idea and turn the whole experience into just another middle of the road shooter. Maybe the joke is on us.
Source: TeamXbox
Category: Xbox 360
