Eat Lead:  

The Return of Matt Hazard Review 

Should’ve been called, Eat Meh: The Return of Fail.  

Reviewed by Coxster 

Played on Xbox 360 

I recently saw this game on sale at JB Hi-Fi for thirty bucks and thought I would take a punt because it actually showed plenty of promise in it’s development.  I usually read a few reviews before laying down cash, but because I was in a rush and the store was almost closing, I thought that for thirty dollars, even if it sucked, I wasn’t going to be too out of pocket.  After playing the game, I have to say that thirty bucks still made Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard too expensive to recommend.   

Zombies are probably the best thing about this game

The thing that made this game stand out from the pack, when I used to follow it’s development, was the good humour that Eat Lead’s premise works around.  Matt Hazard is an out of shape action hero who gets one last role that will hopefully bring him back to the stardom of his former glory.  Part Duke Nukem, part generic badass bald guy, Matt Hazard is a pretty forgettable character with some awful voice acting (which sucks because I like Will Arnett, the guy who voices Matt) that is neither entertaining or humorous, a disastrous combination if your game is based on being one big piss take of every genre that has preceded it.   

Not everything is as bad as the lead character, the gameplay serves it’s purpose but there are a couple of bugs that do tend to irritate. It lacks the finesse that Gears of War’s gameplay offered and ends up being quite annoying, especially since the checkpoints are spread so far apart that you’ll often have to go through the same several skirmishes over and over again, just to get back to where you were before you died.  Since Eat Lead is quite challenging, expect to be killed quite often.  Most of the time I would never have a problem with a high difficulty level, but Eat Lead is only a challenge because it cheats – sounds like an excuse right? Wrong!  There is nothing I hate more in this universe than enemies that spawn behind you, enemies that know exactly where you are when they haven’t seen you enter a level, and enemies you can’t see suddenly appearing behind crates and cover that you know weren’t there two seconds ago.  It’s sloppy design and annoying as hell!  

I do appreciate the humour in some parts of the game, but most of the time they are only smirk worthy.  You won’t find yourself remembering any of the jokes, you won’t even laugh, you’ll probably smile at best and continue pressing the A button.  It’s such a shame because the combination of Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris should’ve guaranteed that the laughs would be fast and fluid, but unfortunately that’s not the case here.  It’s not that they do a bad job with the material they’ve been given, just that the script and jokes are all so flat that even the best performers on the planet couldn’t of made the execution of the satire heavy story a success.  

Zombies playing DDR?

I really like some of the references to older games and genres, westerns to old FPS games like Wolfenstein, not to mention a few digs at JRPGS and of course the current trend of zombies, but because the core gameplay isn’t that exciting, it all comes off as rather weak.  

When you make a game that makes fun of other games, you better guarantee that you get your core gameplay spot on.  Otherwise you end up becoming one of the very games you’re making fun of.  Also if you’re going to make fun of games, you better make sure that your game isn’t worse than the games you’re making fun of, and that happens here…a lot.  

The graphics aren’t that bad and there are constantly different levels and themes to play through, even if you have seen most of them before, but when the game isn’t copying other games, it comes off as shallow, forced and entirely contrived.   

Matt Hazard looks as bored as I felt at this point

I’m not going to say that Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is a bad game through and through, but I will say that it’s only a B-game, and doesn’t offer as much fun as most B-games do (Earth Defence Force and Onechanbara for instance).  If you see this game for about twenty bucks, go for it, the achievements are pretty easy to get, otherwise I can’t really say that I entirely recommend this game.   

With a bit more time, money and skill on behalf of the developers, this game would’ve done a lot better than the budget title that has been released.  Why this game got made instead of a new Duke Nukem is beyond me.  It actually would’ve been funnier if this was the new Duke Nukem game!   You might want to give this one a miss unless you can find it for a good price.