At best it’s hokey, but more often than not it’s simply uninteresting. Taking a pop at Duke Nukem Forever would feel like a cheap gag on even the most adolescent gaming forum. Matt’s quips are awkwardly unimaginative, revelling in tragic cliché, guffawing through suggestions to insert your own witty phrase, in itself a maxim the developers clearly failed to successfully adopt.

It’s often hard to tell if the developers intended their flat script to be a send-up of flat scripts, and it’s very hard to effectively determine what the joke is sometimes actually supposed to be. When being told you’re going to another warehouse, the game stops to pop some text on the screen to bemoan the fundamental familiarity of such a setting. Yet you still spend the next forty minutes trudging around it.

What the satire lacks in quality it makes up in quantity. Instead of focusing on the pace and flow of the levels, Eat Lead chucks in a sly nod at a contemporary gaming trend, and constructing good shooting and cover mechanics was clearly not Vicious Cycle’s primary focus. Whilst the clunky narrative plods on, the resulting game is just as messy. Aiming is irredeemably cumbersome, the weapons bland and unsatisfying. The befuddled design means that anything less than a headshot is a waste of time, yet the enemies on the screen dart about much quicker than the default controls can keep up with.

Firing in a non-stationary position is unmanageable, which wouldn’t be so bad if the game wasn’t so prone to teleporting enemies in behind you without warning. The only way to effectively play is by running into an empty room, waiting for everything to spawn, and then legging it back out before shooting it all. Repeat this for eight hours, with the monotony occasionally broken by some of the least rewarding and most aggravating boss battles of this generation. The fight against a tentacle monster was so inane that I almost stopped playing the game entirely.

The core of the game is unwieldy and imprecise. Matt Hazard’s comeback is so extensively broken that it’s beyond repair. It doesn’t help that Eat Lead is as ugly to look at as it is to play, with hideous square geometry, soulless textures, basic shadowing and amateurish models that would have looked dreadful on a PS2 launch title.

Ultimately, it’s a shame to see a game with such an intriguing concept go to ruin. If this is the best they could make out of Matt Hazard’s spectacular ‘return’, Vicious Cycle shouldn’t have bothered. Eat Lead? I’d rather drink paint and snort rocks than play another minute of it.

Watch the first 10 minutes >>

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