Review: Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (360)

Eat Lead stars the fictional gaming hero Matt Hazard, whose fame ended after being shoe horned into every genre under the sun. Now the company he works for is under new management, and they have decided to bring back Hazard in his first Next Gen adventure (can we please stop calling it that now by the way? The Xbox 360 has been out for just over 3 years now). However it turns out that the new owner actually wants to get rid of Matt, and the only way to do that, due to his lifetime contract, is to kill him in a game, permanently. What follows is a good idea for a game gone wrong as Matt faces off against cowboys, zombies, and 2D Nazis. Sometimes even in the very same room.

Eat Lead is at it’s heart a Third Person Shooter with a barely working cover system. You run, you gun, you try to take cover and either get shot because you stuck to the wrong side of the wall, or get shot even when you’re behind cover. There’s a variety of different weapons in the game but you’ll mostly use pistols as they are the most accurate, which you’ll need because the only way to make progress in the game without wasting your ammo is to head shot every enemy. Ok, we can understand a Halo-esque space marine taking more than a couple of shots to kill, but the guy in the security guard uniform taking over half a clip to the torso before dying? What? 

The game’s graphics are pretty bland, featuring dull lifeless textures that make it seem like early day half decent original Xbox game, rather than a mid term Xbox 360 effort. And while the voice acting is actually rather good (featuring Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris, as the back of the box states, complete with exclamation mark), the rest of the sound design just falls flat. Weapons don’t feel powerful, explosions feel weak, and the music feels generic and phoned in.

The thing is, you get the feeling the game is actually trying to be impressive and clever, but as previously mentioned, there’s no actual effort evident. It’s a parody of games so it’s trying to be funny, and some of the stuff is kind of clever. The conversation with a Final Fantasy/JRPG style Boss, where Matt has to physically press a button for his foe to continue talking in text and starts a rant on the whole genre when it uses an ellipses, did solicit a chuckle, but that was the only time it did. The rest of the jokes are either fall flat, or just receive an acknowledgement. One example is some of the enemies are from a child friendly water gun game “Soak’Em.” SOCOM, geddit? See it’s sort of clever, but not actually funny. Then there’s the game’s Mario parody, Captain Carpenter, who has a Russian accent. Why? Personally we get the feeling that  the guy who did the accent for the Soviet enemies wanted more lines.

There’s also this feeling you should be giving the game the benefit of the doubt. And when you’re in a fire fight with 2D Nazis, who take cover by turning 90 degrees away from you, Lara Croft robots (complete with an American voice actor trying to do a British accent), and water gun-toting commandos, it seems like this should be a lot more fun that it actually is. So you should try and put effort in to liking it, or try and convince that the “sort of” clever jokes are actually funny. But then the Achievements come along and make you remember that the game seems to be trying hard to convince you it’s trying hard and you lose sympathy for it.

Oh yes, the achievements. They are very easy to get, you’ll probably get around 700-800 on a first play through, without actually “achieving” anything. You get an achievement for starting the game, an achievement for pausing the game, one for watching the credits, and so on. In the space of watching the ending cinematic, up to the point where the credits started, Gamestyle got FIVE, one of which was worth 100 points. In total on our first (and only) play through we got 765, and that’s with missing out on some pretty easy ones. One is for the developer not putting in multiplayer, oh okay it’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s actually sums up their use in the game. “We didn’t put enough work in, so here’s some free points!”

Eat Lead wants to be recognised as this post-modern mockery of all those big budget and casual games that sell rather well. But it’s not, it’s just some guy who thinks he’s rather clever, telling obvious jokes that everyone gets that got old two years ago.

Rating: 3 / 10

Words by Garry Webber