Longtime Simpsons writer George Meyer once stated “Cleverness is the eunuch version of funny.” And Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is just that: clever, but not funny. The game starts with a promising premise: after a long career with many titles under his belt, titular video game action hero Matt Hazard finds himself unemployed as the result of some poor career decisions. So when an opportunity to revive his popularity arises, Matt jumps on it—without realizing his new starring role is a trap concocted by former Hazard gamer Wallace Wellesley, whose life was ruined by the extreme difficulty of Matt’s games. What follows from this setup is an action game starring an action hero who’s world-weary and well aware of his genre’s tropes; but for as much promise as this idea holds, it’s really just an awkward, toothless, and unfunny framing device for a lousy third-person shooter.
To explain the overlying theme of Eat Lead’s humor, it’s first important to define a writer’s term that’s not universally known: “hanging a lantern.” To fix any glaring issues that may annoy an audience to the point of distraction, a writer can “hang a lantern (or lampshade)” on a problem by having a character acknowledge it, thereby quieting any anxieties. That being said, the majority of Matt Hazard’s jokes have the hero grumbling about gaming clichés we find ourselves grumbling about; for example, the requisite tutorial at the beginning of the game has Matt complaining about the patronizing nature of being rewarded for completing the simplest of tasks.
But there are two major problems with Eat Lead’s comic intent: A.) Matt Hazard’s self-awareness isn’t inherently funny, and B.) hanging a lantern on problems may work in fiction, but it certainly doesn’t work in video games.
It would be easier to excuse Matt Hazard’s gross miscarriage of humor if the action was halfway decent, but Eat Lead’s third-person cover-based shooting is so awful that the game doesn’t even try to salvage it with lame jokes about how awful it truly is. Instead, it presents the bulk of the game with complete sincerity, with Matt making a few stock action hero quips (out of a very limited repertoire) with absolutely no sense of irony. It’s all a bit strange, because if anything in Matt Hazard requires some serious lantern-hanging, it’s the monotonous, joyless gunfights that wear out their welcome by the end of the first level.
Basically, the bulk of Matt Hazard involves clearing room after room of bad guys who wear different clothes from level to level, but operate with the exact same brain. The addition of cover adds a little spice to Eat Lead’s blandness, but the fact the enemies can practically teleport anywhere into a room ruins any sense of strategy a player could have.
After passing about a dozen identical enemy encounters in Matt Hazard, I thought to myself, “The basic idea of killing everything that moves in a video game isn’t inherently boring, so why is Eat Lead so frustratingly dull?” It was then I realized the game’s biggest flaw: it gives you absolutely no feedback. The gunplay is inconsistent to the point where killing enemies feels like mindless busywork with absolutely no sense of accomplishment; sure, you can go for headshots, but when they only work a third of the time, why bother? And you get no real reward for clearing a room full of enemies, aside from the meager array of underpowered weapons they may drop.
At its most fundamental level, the gameplay of something like Resident Evil 4 isn’t much different, but Capcom’s designers know that an ever-increasing trail of rewards—along with some very nice set pieces—can make even the most methodical of gameplay premises fun. But with Matt Hazard, your only real reward for eradicating a group of enemies is moving on to repeat your actions in a different room with some minor graphical changes; that box you hid behind in one room might turn into a side of beef or an outhouse in the next. The action in Eat Lead is so repetitive that my best moments with the game could be found in the brief, happy instances where I wasn’t shooting anyone.
A lot of Eat Lead could be salvaged if it was actually funny, but the game drops the pretense of humor throughout the levels only to have the most obvious, easy video game jokes appear during the segments in-between. Really, this material doesn’t get funnier than what we saw on Captain N: The Game Master 20 years ago, and, at times, it’s almost if Matt Hazard is trying to ape the lazy humor of shows like Family Guy by being content with referencing things the audience may be aware of, but avoiding any kind of creative twist on said things.
The parody involved in Eat Lead is also disappointing, as it’s really more of cliché celebration than an attempt to take cliché-ridden games down a peg. As I’ve observed in the past, it’s frustrating that video games—above all other media—seem to be so afraid to present humor that’s truly complex and subversive; and, had Matt Hazard aimed its comedic sights a little higher, the lousiness of the game itself might be excusable on some level. But in the end, we’re left with nothing but an unfunny mess that could have went amazing places with its premise.
Grade: D
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The 61FPS Review - Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop (Wii)
The 61FPS Review: Resident Evil 5
The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride