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Video

Launch Player

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Fallout 3 - The Pitt ³⁶⁰

Preview

Eat Lead: The Return Of Matt Hazard

Format Xbox 360

Developer D3

Publisher D3

Genre Action

3-Mar-2009 Bullets and one-liners fire in equal measure as D3 attempt the first action-adventure comedy.

1 Comments

We've just liberated a one-eyed moustached guy calling himself Captain Carpenter from a mushroom prison. He sounds like Snake Plissken but looks like a certain famous Italian plumber.

Later we take on his captor, an effeminate man with long lashes and a freaking-massive sword, who only converses via a text box that floats by his side. Before all this we've tackled cyborg commandos and zombies with just a water pistol and a mouthful of one-liners.

Welcome to Eat Lead, where the phrase 'videogame genre car crash' doesn't quite cover it; more like '40-vehicle pile-up in the middle of the M25, with oil spills. That are on fire'. Such are the number of gaming references and familiar faces crunched together as one-time gaming celebrity Matt Hazard gets a job that'll either resurrect his career, or kill it (and him in the process).

The idea, in principle, is a cracking one. In an alternate world, gaming characters are jobbing actors and games are the chance of another paycheck. It allows for in-jokes riffing on gaming's 30-year history. 2D Nazi soldiers fight alongside burly space marines, their death throes dependent on the era they come from (Nazis delete from the screen, marines fade slowly).

Characters spurt pixels, not blood. We've still to see bikini-busting princesses locked in castles, but we assume they're in there.

The problem is that all this is wrapped around your typical third-person action adventure. You can run and gun, get tactical and shoot from cover; there's even slo-mo when you sucker-punch an enemy in the gut.

But it all looks fairly samey. Visually the game can't match the promise of the idea behind it. We suppose there could be an excuse that the visuals are poor only because they're designed that way (as a spoof of many identikit games) but we're not biting.

With only a couple of months until release, we're cautious as to whether the wisecracks will outweigh the cracks we've seen so far. Check in soon to see whether D3 and Matt Hazard will be up for a Golden Joystick nomination this year.

Ryan King