Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard First Look Preview

Last week Axl Rose finally revealed something that Guns N Roses fans have been waiting for since the early 90s: Chinese Democracy, the lead single from the long-awaited album of the same name. In fact, “long-awaited” doesn’t even cover the truth of the situation – most people thought the LP would never see the light of day. A couple of years ago another band of ageing rockers, The Offspring, were threatened with legal action when they tried to release an album called “Chinese Democracy: You Snooze, You Lose!” Axl clearly didn’t see the funny side…

We recount this story because Chinese Democracy reminds us of Duke Nukem Forever – another near-mythical piece of work. And just as Axl had to deal with the Offspring, the Duke’s absence from our disc drives has made him extremely vulnerable to parody – which is where Matt Hazard steps in.

To be fair, Mr Hazard is a playful riff on pretty much any muscle-bound video game hero you’ve ever seen – it’s just he reminds us an awful lot of the strip bar-loving meathead. You see, Eat Lead is a third-person action game that aims to serve up shooty thrills while lampooning the very genre it celebrates.

The basic concept is that Matt Hazard is the most famous video game character you’ll never remember. According to the Eat Lead backstory, Matt starred in some of the most successful games of all time: the 80s 8-bit hit A Fistful of Hazard, 1995’s You Only Live 1,317 Times, and the wonderfully-named Murder Force. It seemed as if the sky was the limit for our thuggish crusader; in one promotional video he even makes a somewhat sensational claim: “You know that English chick who raids catacombs? I nailed her. How else do you think she got the part?”

Unfortunately, things eventually went a bit downhill at the turn of the millennium. Matt’s developers tried to shoehorn him into a cheap Mario Kart rip-off and a whole bunch of other naff titles, and his career dried up completely. At the start of Eat Lead, the Matt Hazard license is bought by a mysterious investor who wants the star to appear in a brand new game – but things aren’t quite as they seem. It turns out that someone is trying to kill our trigger-happy troublemaker – and this time, death will be permanent.

What this is all translates to is a post-modern third-person action game where the hero is actually aware that he’s inside a video game. As Matt guns his way through each level, his adversary will ‘hack’ the game in an attempt to kill him off – spawning all sorts of old nasties from the star’s back catalogue. The idea is that things could change at any given moment, forcing the player to stay on their toes at all times. The level we were shown was set inside a nightclub packed with gangsters, but after a few fights the villain started spawning zombies all over the place. Later on the level was suddenly warped to resemble the Wild West, forcing Matt to take on a bunch of grizzly cowboys. These varied enemies will require different tactics, but on the plus side you’ll be able to learn new tricks from them thanks to the input of a mysterious coder named QA, who acts as your only ally. For example, defeating the cowboys will gain you the ability to dual-wield pistols – allowing for all sorts of John Woo-style hijinks.

If all goes to plan for development studio D3, the end result will be a chaotic mix of The Matrix and a Charlie Kaufman film. It’s certainly a fun concept, allowing for neat touches like enemies who bleed code, rather than blood, when you shoot them. Matt himself is also a promising hero, spouting one-liners in the middle of frenetic gunfights. “Not to trivialise the danger here, but I love this cover-to-cover mechanic!” he cries. We’ve not had a chance to try this out for ourselves, but it seems a slight variation on the standard setup and resembles the cover system in the recent Quantum of Solace – you simply aim at where you want to go, and hit a button to send yourself dashing off in that direction. If this arrangement makes it easier to fire off shots while moving from spot to spot, so much the better.

The version of Eat Lead we were shown was merely a very early pre-alpha build, but even at this stage it was still clear where the game’s potential strengths and weaknesses lie. It seems to be shaping up nicely on the graphical side of things, and the in-game banter we heard was colourful and fairly amusing – although Matt’s cheeky asides were already getting a bit repetitive by the end of the demo, so let’s hope they record a lot more of them. The biggest concern is that this will be yet another third-person shooter in a market that’s already nearing saturation – and on top of that, there are currently no plans to offer multiplayer or co-op modes. If D3 sticks to its guns on this decision, it’s going to place an awful lot of pressure on the single-player campaign. Still, we like the basic concept a lot – and genuinely funny games are few and far between these days. Here’s hoping that Mr Hazard’s latest expedition can live up to his own (fictional) past achievements.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is due out for Xbox 360 and PS3 in the first quarter of 2009.