Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (2009)

I loved Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. It is the ultimate definition of parody and still managed to be a fun game with excellent music and acceptable game play.

In the game, you take on the fictional hero Matt Hazard, a video game character that was, like Duke Nukem for example, a true classic back in the day. Now, twenty five years later, he returns to the scene with a new video game. He screwed up his reputation back in the day by trying other genres, giving him the accidental reputation of a “kid friendly character”. Now, he attempts his ultimate combat by starring in some sort of mafia crime game, where he is a detective.

He is supposed to be the star of the game, but instead, is hindered and placed in unfair situations by some unknown force, that changes the environment constantly right before his eyes. It is later revealed by QA, your AI companion and your guide through the game, that Wallace Wellesly is behind all of this. He is the lead programmer for the fictional company that created the game and because he hates Matt Hazard for ruining his childhood game experience with his earlier games, he wants to mock him by letting him die on the first level.

Wallace created “Sting Sniperscope”, a generic dude with a sniper rifle and a German accent, who is supposed to whoop the floor with Matt and become the replacement hero of the game. Matt defeats Sting however and because the game will break if there is no main protagonist, Matt takes his place and tries to reach the headquarters of the company to take revenge on Wallace. He is constantly attacked by all sort of random enemies and situations, that are hacked in into the game in real time by Wallace and his team members to stop him. Matt defeats Wallace and takes his place in gaming history once again as a true, classic video game hero.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard plays in third person with an over the shoulder angle. The game follows a linear path in which you progress through levels. You can hold two weapons. It also features a cover system which worked quite well in my opinion. There is a bar that you can fill by defeating enemies, which let you use special skills like freezing bullets. These skills come available when you progress through the game.

The graphics are not bad actually. It is PlayStation 3 era, and for this time, the game looks good. The glitch and programming effects are nicely done and the animations of Matt and enemies are good enough.

Where the game shines is its music. The fight tracks are epic and pump you up for the fighting ahead. It is wonderful what good, metal soundtracks can do to enhance your experience. The sound effects are fair, although a little blend and “pea shooter” like. I say fair, because some parody weapons in the game are designed to sound like crap.

The controls are a little stiff, but still playable. The cover system and the controls to switch cover work great. The only problem is that you cannot maneuver quickly or do anything really to evade enemy fire while not in cover. This is also my only complaint with the game, especially on higher difficulty levels, which makes the game almost unplayable then.

The game is linear, a little repetitive and comes with “kill walls” in which you need to defeat every enemy on screen in order to progress. This can be a little tedious, especially because of the automatic checkpoint system that saves your progress after two or three of these kill walls. If you die, you know that you need those two or three rooms all over again, without any other approach to do it.

However, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard makes up for this by being funny as hell. Sometimes, games try to hard to be funny or make really lame jokes that do not even make you breeze through your nose, but with this game, I actually laughed. The humor is spot on. Many franchises are completely destroyed with parody like the failed Socom series, which is now called Soak’em. Enemies fight with water guns, that do a surprisingly amount of damage. Reject Wolfenstein 3D soldiers are introduced and even zombies. The best part of the humor in my opinion, is the self confidence of Matt, where he believes that he is the most badass dude in the game, while constantly being mocked, insulted or downright laughed at.

In the end, I really enjoyed Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard and I truly recommend this underrated classic, despite its flaws.