Reviewed: January 4, 2005
Reviewed by: Mike Colgan
Publisher
O~3 Entertainment
Developer
Virtual Toys
Cinemaware
Released: December 14, 2004
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature
3
4
2
3
3.0
System Requirements
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
I’ll admit it; I’m hooked on offensive humor. Ever since the debut of South Park, I’ve reveled in humor that fights back against the cultural squeeze of political correctness on the left and Concerned Mothers Against Everything on the right. And so I must say that I was intrigued by the concept of Torrente, or at least its marketing. The box illustrated with a bald, fat cop with a gun down the front of his pants and flanked by two scantily clad hotties promised to provide hours of guns, girls, and raunchy humor. The hype on the back of the box promises “maximum mayhem,” “immersive environments,” and “novel gameplay.”
Imagine my disappointment when I installed Torrente on my PC and load it up, only to find that Torrente is nothing but a stale, unimaginative first/third person shooter. My first thought was “who the [expletive] thought this was a good idea?” So I did a little research, and found that Torrente has a strange background indeed. It turns out that Torrente is based on a Spanish movie entitled “Torrente: El Brazo Tonto de Ley” (Torrente: The Dumb Arm of the Law). Although the first movie is apparently not even available in the United States, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for Torrente 2: Mission en Marbella on Region 1 DVD.
So it turns out that this game sucked for the same reasons that almost all movie tie-in games suck: the Spanish creators, Virtual Toys S.L., were just trying to make a quick buck off the movie. It’s strange, though, that upstart O-3 Entertainment threw their lot in with a tie-in game for a movie that’s probably never been seen in the States. Perhaps they were trying to capitalize on the popularity of the Grand Theft Auto series. Too bad this game lacked the great gameplay and humor of GTA.
Torrente is a standard first-person shooter. If you’ve played any first person shooter since Wolfenstein 3-D, you will be familiar with the gameplay here. You have 100 health points and a number of different weapons with which to kill wave after wave of bad guys. Even though the default view is from a first person perspective, you can scroll the mouse-wheel to zoom out to a third-person view, should you wish to see Torrente plod along.
You are the title character, Torrente: a fat, bald, sexist, drunk Spanish ex-cop. Your mission, should you choose to shell out $19.99 plus tax for this game, is to shoot a bunch of cloned Mafia thugs who come equipped with scary-looking weapons but generally just stand there and look criminal. Careful not to shoot any civilians, or else your heart will explode and you’ll die; but not to worry, since all the bad guys look like the same 5 or 6 bad guys throughout the entire game.
If the bad guys do choose to shoot at you, don’t worry, because they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from 2 feet away, and just stand there ready for you to pop them. Except, of course, for the big guys wielding grenade launchers, who will blow you to pieces before you even get a chance to identify your assailant.
Although the game at times (and on the box) looks like Grand Theft Auto, you cannot commandeer any of the cars that meander the streets of Madrid and Marbella, which is doubly unfortunate because Torrente waddles along quite appropriately for a man of his… stature.
The manual for Torrente is practically non-existent. In order to figure out what the controls were, I had to go to the controls menu when I started the game. There is a “training” option on the opening screen, but said training consists only of a stadium filled with identical bad guys and no sorts of instruction or ratings for your accuracy.
When I got to the end of the first mission, which involves diffusing a time bomb, the game gave me no clue about how to disarm the bomb – all it provided was a red power meter at the top of the screen. After trying every key and button I could think of, and even shooting the bomb (probably not a great idea, but ultimately ineffective) I found the solution to the closest thing to a puzzle in this game: I mashed the right button. I mashed the right mouse button like an agitated, caffeine-addicted research chimp who just found out that the yellow button dispenses bananas. I’m not exactly sure how this relates to disarming a bomb. It certainly wasn’t fun, and I now suffer from a repetitive-stress injury I like to call “Torrente Thumb.” And I received no banana.
Unlike the title character, the graphics in Torrente are bland and inoffensive. There is nothing particularly WRONG with the graphics; in fact, 3 or 4 years ago some of the character models would have been considered good. However, the entire game looks like a game from 1998. The visuals are too colorful, and the textures look like they were slapped on like cheap wallpaper. Don’t even think about asking for shadows, shading, or light sourcing.
The levels are supposed to be modeled after Madrid and the Mediterranean resort town of Marbella. However, even with the traffic and the throngs of cloned civilians, the cities feel lifeless. The only advertisements and posters around, strangely enough, are advertisements for the game itself!
The best thing that can be said for the music in Torrente is that it is not annoying or overly repetitive. Unfortunately, some really good music could have helped the theme of the game along and make you feel like a wacky chauvinist cop kicking around Spain. Unfortunately, the makers of the game dropped the ball in this regard.
The sound, however, can be obnoxious. On both the opening screen menu and the pause menu of the game, the cursor is a buzzing fly. Unfortunately, this cursor is accompanied by a deafening, constant buzz that is louder than any other sound in the game, and will make you want to get through the options as quickly as possible to avoid the ear-splitting headache that will ensue.
When Torrente (voiced by the actor who plays Torrente in the movies, Santiago Segura) speaks, it is almost impossible to hear him. And when you can hear his slurred, drunken muttering, he is usually spouting off catch phrases about Madrid soccer teams or other jokes that Americans probably will not get. Throughout the game Torrente will use a handful of catch phrases, including the ironic “Here comes Torrente, life and soul of the party.” Well, this game’s no party I’d want to be invited to.
Although new to the American market, Torrente currently occupies store shelves at $19.99. Normally such a price would be a bargain for a computer game, but if I were to pay twenty dollars for this steaming pile of mierda, I would feel robbed. There are 60 or so “missions,” but the missions are so monotonous and frustrating that 60 is about 59 too many.
Don’t be fooled by this game’s marketing. Torrente is a lame movie tie-in, which should have never been released in the United States in the first place. The graphics are bland, the sound is grating, and the gameplay is about as much fun as watching paint dry. There are better things you could do with twenty dollars. Like take your girlfriend out to a movie, or donate it to charity, or even set the twenty-dollar bill on fire and watch it burn.