The pitch to Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is good, if nothing else. The joke, you see, is that this is the first Matt Hazard game. In his own universe he’s an iconic videogame legend whose fortunes took a turn for the worse in the nineties with some rather misguided spin-offs, including his own kart racer. He’s aching for another shot at the big-time, and Eat Lead is Matt’s opportunity to break into the next-gen.

As a premise, the game must have been gold, but somewhere along the line it became tangled up in poor direction and weak programming, with any lingering moments of fun clearly lost along the way. At least the developers can congratulate themselves with the knowledge that few games have managed to descend into monotony with such haste after a slick opening sequence.

Part of the problem is that it lacks any real sense of cohesion. Matt discovers that his next-gen title is a thinly veiled attempt by the game designers to have him killed. It’s not explained why. The meta-narrative clearly believes it can forsake exposition on the basis that it’s a comedy so rigorously intertwined with gaming pop-culture that it needs no elaboration of its own.

It’s also a wasted opportunity. For all the work gone into creating the heritage, Vicious Cycle has completely failed at weaving it into the game; 25 years of back-story and countless exploitable design opportunities have been lazily compressed into a bland Gears of War knock-off. Matt’s career is summed up in enemy character designs, creating a bizarre on-screen cornucopia of the same eight enemy types endlessly intermingling. Eat Lead is split over eight miserable levels, each starting with a distinctive, generic theme but eventually merging into one insufferable whole as Max’s enemies start to bleed into one another. There’s no tactful handling of pace, or design, instead lumping everything together and hoping it comes off as wacky.

It’s safe to say Eat Lead is the only game where you’ll be fighting robot babes at the same time as zombies, nefarious Russians and construction workers. It’s amazing just how tedious the implementation of such an outlandish idea is, however. The 2D Wolfenstein-inspired ‘Wafferthins’ deserve a special mention for being a particularly good touch, but that’s the problem: for all their supposed variety, most of the enemies are bland, and endlessly repeated. Most of them use the same tired, recycled animations, too.

The game is, to give it credit where it is due, occasionally very funny. But the developers give themselves more acclaim than they’re worth, believing their jokes to be spectacular. The script derides videogaming convention with aplomb: after taking a painfully self-aware elongated elevator ride (complete with an acerbic jibe about the unimportance of gaming) the player might crack a smile. The gag is functional, if unspectacular. When the exact same joke is repeated a couple of levels later, you’re not a player in some humorous comedy set-up, you’re just taking an artificially long elevator journey.

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