Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

I didn’t know much about Matt Hazard before purchasing it. I’ve got into this habit of looking at games in shops and looking up the achievements online before deciding whether or not to buy them. Matt Hazard was not advertised as difficult but I didn’t look further than the fact that they were all offline achievements. I saw this as meaning an easy game and it will be the last time I use that as a measure!

The game follows the story of Matt Hazard, a video game ‘star’ from the 80s who is about to make his comeback and I’m not speaking metaphorically. He is a game character making his comeback. The story is the best part of the game which is something of a rarity for shooting games.

You have to take Matt through several levels of bad guys as the owner of the company that makes the Matt Hazard games tries to kill him. I mean, in the game ‘kill him’ so it’s not like he will actually die but I found the whole breaking-the-fourth-wall aspect incredibly funny. Especially the way that Matt interacts with Sting Sniperscope, the guy who is meant to be replacing Matt. He constantly mocks him and in generic computer game script, Sting can’t quite deal with it.

Another gem from the in game dialogue occurs in level six when Matt has a face-off with a bad guy from a fake JRPG game from before voice actors and has to physically scroll through dialogue boxes. When he asks to talk the JRPG out of fighting, he responds with ‘...’ which causes Matt to go a tirade about the use of ellipses and how much of a gamer’s time is wasted scrolling through ellipses.’

Another aspect that made me laugh is how many other games Hazard pokes fun at. As mentioned above there is a general pop at JRPGs but there is also mockery for World of Warcraft, (Bill the Wizard) James Bond (Kitty Abundanza – who also highlights that everyone loves Bond even though he continuously cheats on women), Halo (Master Chef) and the surely copyright infringing Captain Carpenter (who is Mario in a blue costume and is a carpenter instead of a plumber).

In addition to the storyline, the sound, inclusive of in-game music and voices, are really well done. The music is very fitting to what’s going on in the game and has a very catchy ‘success’ theme. Matt himself is voiced by Will Arnett and Wally Wellesley is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris and it is amazing how much extra credibility the characters have because of this. It actually feels like they care about the characters and invest in them.

Visually the game is below par, but that could also be to do with the parody from the story. And it is in keeping with what the game is trying to do.

However, no matter how much parody you introduce, at the end of the day a game is still a game and it is there to be played. If you are going to execute the above stuff really well then please, please get the gameplay right.

Matt Hazard is a cover based over-the-shoulder shooter and the major problem with this is that Matt  constantly gets in the way of enemies, preventing me from seeing or aiming at bad guys until it’s too late. This is annoying but not as annoying when I try to take cover and prevent myself from being shot, Matt will just casually strafe to the right. All the time. Into the line of fire, mid-reload without a sense of self preservation and then shout at me like it’s my fault! This is one of the worst kinds of game bugs out there and it sure as hell isn’t my controller either (testing carried out).

Also the over the shoulder camera means that the shooting becomes based more on luck than skill. First person would have been much better. The amount of times I was killed with one shot while in cover was ridiculous towards the end. Other criticisms include a limited variety of bad guys, and the fact there are only eight levels, however towards the end of my playing of the game I was grateful for both of these.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Generally speaking most of the achievements can be earned during a single playthrough. Without going out of my way, I managed to bag 36 of these on one playthrough. You get four at once for completing the game; five if you do it on the higher difficultly available from the start. This seems like they wanted to have fifty achievements for the sake of it.

Other achievements include getting 50 kills with the various weapons in the game. I had two of these left over at the end and the only reason for this was the fact that they are secret for some bizarre reason.

There are two achievements for collecting 20 each of the in game power ups. This required additional playthrough time as I didn’t see enough of them in one playthrough to get twenty.

A few others that I missed were bizarre scenario-specific achievements with varying degrees of stupid. One of these was to kill all enemies in the butcher shop with headshots. The scenario itself was straight forward but when you factor in the fact that it is a secret achievement, it becomes stupid. Also in the same level as the butcher’s shop you have to traverse a dance-floor area without killing any of the dancers. This is also secret but the dancers can be killed by the enemies who are trying to kill you, which puts the achievement into the luck-based stupid pile.

The achievement for destroying potted plants is repetitively stupid because you need to destroy 30 of them and there are only seven throughout the entire game. Luckily they are all in one place and they are at the beginning of a level but still, making you replay the same minute of a level is stupid.

Another few stupid ones are for killing a bandit from behind, destroying all the meat in the butcher level (secret) and my personally stupid favourite, killing three testers with one grenade. This is a special one because there are only two points in the final level of the game where three testers will appear at once. And only once in a blue moon will they appear in a place where they can all be killed with the same grenade. This is also at the end of the level which makes the preparation for trying very tiresome and just slightly inconvenient.

And lastly, completing a shitty game (in the area of gameplay) TWICE because you can’t play it through on the hardest difficultly from the start is totally fucking stupid. Several people have said that you can use a code to unlock the hardest difficulty level from the start but I didn’t find this out until after completing my first playthrough.

Downloadable Content – N/A

When you factor in the above gameplay complaints with playing the game on the hardest difficulty, (for a second time) it becomes a monotonous chore where I found that my survival was more dependent on luck than my skill at aiming without being able to see my targets. I certainly will not be touching or even going near the game again, which is a real shame when you consider the amount of effort they put into the story and characters.

I didn’t mention this above because it was low on my list of annoyances but the cut-scenes aren’t skippable either which is extra stupid on a second playthrough. The level of the story almost made me forget this though which is a testament to how good I thought it was.