Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard should have been great.  The premise of making a parody-action game that tips its hat to the oddities and clichés of the industry is something that just screams entertaining. Unfortunately, Matt Hazard's first real outing is marred by too many poor design choices that mute out the attempts at comedy.

Eat Lead's protagonist, Matt Hazard, is a fictional videogame star with a robust catalog of videogame credits to his name. However, after a few awful spinoffs and reinventions, he began to lose popularity and soon faded into obscurity, nearly bankrupting his fictional developer, Marathon Games, in the process. Then one day, Matt receives a phone call from the newly reinvigorated company asking him to star in their newest next-generation game. It turns out that Marathon has been purchased by a mysterious CEO by the name of Wallace Wellesley.  Wellesley intended to put Hazard in the new game and kill him off for good. As a child, Wellesley could never beat the Matt Hazard games, and harbors a grudge against the game star for making his life miserable. The story only serves as a way to tie in parodies of other games, such as Master Chef or the Soak 'em (SOCOM) games.



Controlling Matt is fairly standard. The game employs a cover system similar to Gears of War or Dark Sector, with a few interesting tweaks to the pop-and-stop formula. For example, most of the cover in the game is destructible, so simply hiding and taking shots won't get you past some of the larger battles.  The game balances this difficulty with the ability to run to pretty much any other available cover on the fly by simply aiming at it and pressing the Y button. The cover system, though generally ok, sometimes wasn't responsive enough when taking cover, and too responsive when leaving cover. The gunplay ranges from generic to awesome, depending on your current arsenal and power-up. Some guns like the magnum or the assault rifle are made more interesting when you add one of the two modifiers to it (ice or flames) while other guns, like the shotgun, seem to be pretty much useless in terms of power. There are also weapons in place for the sheer humor of it, like the water pistol, which honestly should have been played down a bit.

Graphically, the game is a mixed bag. While Hazard himself looks pretty cool, the various types of enemies you encounter feel generic and lack any type of personality. Perhaps this is also a parody the developers wanted to play, but it doesn't change the fact that you still have to mow down armies of generic-looking butchers and cloned Russian soldiers in pretty much every level. Speaking of levels, the designers have somehow managed to make locations as diverse as nightclubs, mansions, yachts, and restaurants all look like the same warehouse. They did it on purpose to point out that other games do it, but again, it forces the players to suffer through a bad joke.



The biggest flaw comes from the startlingly broken artificial intelligence. Considering how dumb the enemy AI is, it's actually kind of amazing how many cheap deaths you'll run into in a given level. Adversaries will run directly up to you, and basically wait to be shot or clobbered to death. However, players can expect to get shot often by things off screen from every direction, resulting in the aforementioned cheap deaths. It also seems like the boss battles weren't really thought out beyond the concept phases. The worst example is the battle on a pirate ship against a bunch of tentacles. They loom above you, waiting to randomly strike down on you and kill you in one hit. They don't follow a pattern, so tracking their movement is the best way to avoid dying. Unfortunately, the camera isn't angled to seeing that high up, so you can look at maybe two at a time, but will have no idea what the other six are doing behind you. It's really frustrating, and will make more than a few players give up on the game as a whole.

Of course, any review of Eat Lead would be incomplete if its main point – the humor – weren't mentioned. Certain jokes, like having low poly dancers at the nightclub actually have hinges at the joints, were pretty funny.  Another interesting bit was the achievement for playing multiplayer, when there is in fact no multiplayer in the game at all.  Other jokes, like bitching about the lack of a jump button, only serve to remind players that they have no jump button. Most of the character dialogue is witty without feeling too smart, and Neil Patrick Harris and Will Arnett do a great job with their characters. The exchanges Matt has with the stereotypical boss characters before their battle are usually pretty funny. Thanks to how annoying these battles are, though, you'll probably end up hating all the bosses anyway.



It would be wrong to call Eat Lead a bad game. While it definitely has flaws, it's easy to see where its heart is. The combat can get pretty fun at some points, and the humor is decent, especially when looked at from a developer standpoint. Still, wait for the price to go down a bit before taking this one on, or just simply rent it. You can get most of the achievements in one playthrough and there aren't any alternate endings, so there is little in the way of replayability. It may not be the best time spent, but for some players, it might just be Hazard Time.


Fun Factor: A humorous storyline with some good gunplay moments.

Game Length:  About seven hours or so.

Difficulty: The enemies are easy, but you'll die a lot from cheap kills.

On the Negative Side: Stupid AI and repetitive environments. Some one-liners get old fast.

Bang for your buck: There aren't too many funny games around these days, so some players may get a kick out of it. However, the high price tag will probably scare them all away.