I really liked this game until I suddenly didn't anymore. After a few hours once the difficulty ramps up it's flaws become really apparent and it falls victim to a lot of the same things that Duke Nukem Forever did. It's rusty and unpolished which makes it impossible to be precise. When you're playing on the hardest difficulty and can be one shotted at any given moment, precision isI really liked this game until I suddenly didn't anymore. After a few hours once the difficulty ramps up it's flaws become really apparent and it falls victim to a lot of the same things that Duke Nukem Forever did. It's rusty and unpolished which makes it impossible to be precise. When you're playing on the hardest difficulty and can be one shotted at any given moment, precision is absolutely vital. The inability to be precise, both with aiming and picking up weapons, becomes so incredibly frustrating. You get stuck on edges, you get stuck swapping or switching between weapons. It feels like they spent too much money on the voice cast rather than polishing up the gameplay and mechanics.
What I really liked and found interesting was the concept. This is a game that blends together all the video game genres and it's biggest characters into one shared universe that traverses both the real world and the video game one. It reminded me of Wreck It Ralph and Matt Hazard predates Ralph by a number of years. Matt Hazard is your typical video game cliche action man hero ala Duke Nukem or Doom guy etc and he plays a little like Deadpool. He's aware that he is a video game character and he pokes fun at the genre. Like the Deadpool movie, Eat Lead feels simultaneously like a parody and celebration of it's respective genre. Will Arnett voices the titular character. The concept and the story were much more interesting than all the other games I've recently played like Fracture, Haze, Timeshift so I initally was going to rate it much better than those games. It blends together cowboys, space marines, zombies, femme fatales etc as it referenced Halo, Mario, Duke Nukem, Splinter Cell among other popular video game franchises. In what other game can you set fire to your enemies using a water gun? However, the gameplay was so bad and boring by the end that I couldn't justify going higher than 6 but knowing it deserved better than 5. EDIT: The more I think about this game the more I hate it. I remember thinking the gameplay was so boring and the experience so frustrating that it's unforgivable. I changed my rating down to a 5. I def had more fun playing Duke Nukem Forever than this.
It will definitely be more memorable in the end. This also has trophies giving it a bit more replayability which I thought would push it a notch above the other games I've recently played, but I just couldn't pull the trigger on that. Plus I really love Will Arnett's voice acting which again I thought would give it an edge yet I couldn't help but feel like they didn't get the most out of him. This was before Lego Batman and Bojack Horseman so perhaps his voice over work wasn't on point yet. I also couldn't help but think how much better a concept this would have been had the main character been Duke Nukem and you could get appearances by Master Chief and Mario instead of the knock off joke versions of them. It had a lot of things going for it, but just didn't quite hit the homerun it was looking for.
Also if you take a look at the boxart it has Matt Hazard dual wielding a minigun and what appears to be an assault rifle maybe with an attached grenade launcher. Neither of these weapons appear in the game. You only dual wield a pair of six shooters, and sub machine guns. Based on the box art I thought this would be more of a Doom 2016 type game where you run and gun and blast your way through enemies with a seemingly limitless supply of ammo. Instead Eat Lead gave us a third person cover shooter where you tediously wait for enemies to expose their heads and you meticulously aim just to miss because the precision sucks, then wait another 30 seconds to repeat the process. Yawn. I felt lied to. If your came is soley going to be a third person cover shooter, it should be really good at that. So many games have better cover shooter mechanics and more satisfying controls. I thought of how much better Uncharted plays and feels. Furthermore the Uncharted games aren't solely third person cover shooters. They have climbing, puzzles, cinematics, driving, etc. I hate to bring up Naughty Dog games with every review but they honestly deserve it since they continue to turn out some of the best, top notch stuff. It never felt like "Eat Lead!" and felt more like "Will you let me shoot you please?"
Overall this is an okay game. I found it more interesting than fun.… Expand
Eat Lead: The Return of Matt HazardYour Score0 out of 10User Score
