Reviewed: March 15, 2009
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
D3 Publisher

Developer
Vicious Cycle

Released: February 27, 2009
Genre: Action
Players: 1

8
8
9
6
8.1

Supported Features:

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is first and foremost a spoof of many other video games from the past two decades. It’s not meant to compete with the AAA titles sitting on the shelf next to it, thus the slightly reduced debut price of $49. Eat Lead is the video game version of spoof movies like Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Disaster Movie, etc. It’s an homage to a genre, full of subtle (and not so subtle) in-jokes and sight gags for fans of the content it is spoofing. Sadly, most of the people who have reviewed the game so far simply failed to grasp the concept.

Matt Hazard assumes that video game characters have a digital life outside of their video game careers. They are merely actors who perform in games much like movies and then kick back at their palatial estates, and Matt Hazard is the biggest action star of them all. The opening movie introduces the long legacy of Hazard, starting with his 8-bit career in side-scrollers. Like any video game character Matt has had some ups and downs in his career of more than 20 years, but now he’s back and ready to star in a big budget 3D action title, only the new owner of the company who owns Matt’s lifetime contract has different plans.

It seems Matt is only being used as a marketing tool and he is supposed to be killed off in the first level of the new game. With the help of an outside hacker known only as “QA” and a few other characters from Matt’s past, he must find the source of this betrayal and set things right, but he’ll have to travel through eight video game chapters spanning all sorts of genres and locations from gaming history and face one of the most interesting and diabolical assortment of enemies ever assembled. Break out your squirt guns…its HAZARD TIME!

We kick things off with the “obligatory tutorial” that even Matt finds a bit condescending and unnecessary, so expect plenty of wisecracks as you learn how to shoot, aim, punch, and take cover. Oh yeah…there is this really new and cool point-and-cover system where once you are already in cover you simply point to the next nearby cover object and press Y and you will automatically reposition yourself. Even Matt thinks this is cool and so do I. It really helps when you have to cross a large area while under sniper fire.

The rest of the controls and the gameplay are nothing new. You fire your weapons, and there are a lot of weapons, or you can punch and kick. It takes three melee attacks to kill any enemy or you can soften them up first with a few bullets then move in for a slow-motion fatality. But the enemies are where things start to get interesting, and not so much in their number but in the way the game mixes them up.

Just imagine that your hard drive got fragmented and all your video games bled over into one another. That is pretty much the scenario for most of Matt Hazard. You’ll be walking through a disco and suddenly the music will change to something with a western flavor, the screen will fizzle and the next thing you know you are shooting at cowboys hiding behind barrels and an outhouse. And while you are shooting at those guys a zombie might claw his way up from the ground and start to stumble towards you, or some guys in colorful body armor might spawn in and start attacking with water pistols and super-soaker rifles.

What’s really fun is that each of these enemy types requires different tactics and sometimes different weapons, and by throwing them all at you in various groupings you are constantly having to change your tactics. The Soak ‘Em enemies will go down with regular bullets but water-based weapons take them down much quicker, while zombies can only be killed with a headshot. Space Marines fall much quicker at the hands of an Energy Pistol or Pulse Rifle otherwise it could take dozens of rounds from twin Uzis or a shotgun. And then you have traditional power-ups like "quad damage" and "invulnerability", although they have cool new names and glowing graphics.

Matt Hazard spoofs games on multiple levels. You have the thematic jokes like a part of a level that uses an exact reproduction of the graphics from Wolfenstein 3D complete with 2D Nazis that are impossible to hit when they turn sideways because they become paper-thin. These enemies spill out into other game levels creating a serious challenge since you can only attack them head-on. There are jokes about barrels, elevator load times, longwinded bosses in JRPG’s, and many others, I don’t want to spoil the fun because a lot of the fun is discovering these references while playing. Eat Lead even throws in some QTE boss fight sequences.

But even better are the more direct parodies of very specific games and characters. You have Master Chef who looks a lot like a certain Halo hero only this guy is wearing a chef’s hat. You have a guy with a mustache, overalls, and cap who exits his level through a magical green pipe that appears in the floor. You have Lara Croft, Joanna Dark, and many other cameos, but the best has to be the boss with the perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation.

And then the game does some really clever stuff like hacking the rules and forcing you to repeat part of a boss battle – I really thought my game was glitching – and near the end of the game after you have defeated all of the A.I. the villain will have every employee in the company sign on and start to attack you, so you have all of these MMO-style characters with wacky names and health bars over the heads.

Visually, Eat Lead has a few issues and while I would like to dismiss them as intentional parodies of historic video games I can’t. Even when the game is supposed to be “next-gen” there are numerous aliasing issues and horrible jaggies in certain scenes. Oddly enough, the poor graphics are often outshined by the creative enemy designs and the excellent model for Matt, which, if you look closely, has a small video monitor on his back that actually shows you a miniature view of your screen. It’s not useful in anyway but it is extremely cool.

The levels are creative in design and theme but they are assembled in such a way that you find yourself wandering through a maze of corridors leading to an arena-style room where you dispatch a few dozen of whatever enemies the game throws at you, and then you repeat. There are some standout levels like the Mansion and the Cruise Ship, but even these get repetitive after a while.

There are great special effects and colorful lighting. Textures range from really good to really simple, but Eat Lead does a fantastic job of emulating the genre and even the period of time for the game it is spoofing. The game covers so many genres and enemy types, often changing in mid-level, the visuals remain fresh and always amusing.

The music for Eat Lead is phenomenal and if there were a soundtrack CD I would buy it now. Each genre is represented by some fantastic music that is dynamically changing, so you might be fighting space marines to a knock-off of the Halo theme and then you’ll start to hear western music just before the screen fizzles and cowboys and wooden barrels materialize, or perhaps you hear some Resident Evil theme music and zombies rise from glowing red portals. The music not only fits the themes, it actually hints at what is about to happen.

The voice work is exceptional and exceptionally funny. Will Arnett does the macho Duke Nukem-style voice for Matt Hazard while Neil Patrick Harris plays Wally, the frustrated boss of the software company trying to kill Matt. There are plenty of other great voices like the aforementioned Arnold impersonator plus some sexy female voices to mix things up. Expect to hear plenty of hysterical one-liners and random dialogue. One of my favorites has to be from the Soak ‘Em soldiers who will say something like, “I’m down to my last squirt…anybody see a hose?” or instead of “reloading” they will yell, “refilling, cover me!”

Eat Lead spans 8 chapters which will take you anywhere from 8-12 hours to finish on the default skill level. The game is hard; really hard at times, mostly due to the sheer number of enemies and the constant mixing of tactics to take out the mixed hoards. There are a few troublesome boss fights but nothing that simple tactics and lots of patience won’t conquer. The final fight is overwhelming – I can’t imagine doing it on the unlockable Maximum Hazard difficulty setting.

The Achievement Points are hilarious, both in their names as well as in how you earn them. You’ll get a few points for merely starting the game while more are awarded for watching the end credits. Others will take a bit of dedication but they will always put a smile on your face when they chime in. Most players should easily get 600-700 points on their first pass and finishing the game twice will certainly get you all 1000 points.

Finishing the game and earning all 1000 AP can easily be done over the course of a weekend rental, so this may be the better option for some hardcore gamers, but for me, Eat Lead is more of a nostalgic trip down memory lane. It spoofs the games and the genres I love and lets me revisit some of my favorite characters and see them in a whole new light.

But best of all, I had fun and laughed my ass off playing this game from start to finish. Other than a few spots like the tentacle boss and final fight with Wally, Eat Lead was a smooth and challenging ride that will certainly appeal to gamers old enough to get the jokes. Younger kids will simply dismiss this game as another budget shooter, but anyone who has been playing games as long as I have will love The Return of Matt Hazard.