Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico

poor
key review info
  • Game: Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico
  • Platform: Playstation
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: N/a
  • Reviewed on:

Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico is a mindless hackneyed tale of, you've guessed, a gunslinger in Mexico, a tale written in bullets on the corpses of countless enemies which, wonder of wonders, is just a pathetic excuse for a hell lot of bloodletting.

Story The protagonist of this monumental action epic for the brain-dead is Ramiro Cruz, an ex-convict criminal who has a twin brother that works for the DEA. His brother is injured while working undercover just as he's about to get in with some powerful drug lords in Mexico. Ramiro is brought in to replace him for the task, and about a billion bullets later you're dealing with crooked DEA agents and a revenge plot about who really killed their father, a former DEA agent himself. This of course doesn't mean a thing. The plot is as interesting as a shaved monkey picking its nose, a mere excuse for you to get out and start shooting things. What little storyline exists is largely turned irrelevant by the incredibly cheesy voice acting and writing. Let's just say the story's sole strong point is that it exists.

Gameplay Total Overdose is one large partly digested chunk of elements borrowed from other games. Just like in Grand Theft Auto the game takes place in a largely open-ended city in which you can freely wander around while looking for hidden bonuses and items, or you can just kill everyone who crosses your path if you are so inclined as, unlike Grand Theft Auto, there are no consequences for your actions whatsoever.

The game is structured into a series of missions, some of them optional, all of which appear on the (crappy) in-game mini-map as little icons - missions ranging from killing rampages, checkpoint races or blowing things up, to checkpoint races, blowing things up, and even more killing rampages. Most of them are rather short, with the exception of the main story missions that are generally longer, often having multiple sections, with plenty of combat against drug dealers, border patrol officers, and just about anyone else unfortunate enough to be crossing your path. Actually, the whole game is rather short, only about eight hours long, but even those proved agonizingly long for this masterpiece, despite its being quite easy overall.

The gunplay is similar with that from Max Payne, bullet time and everything, aside from the insane physics-defying acrobatic moves Ramiro can perform for seemingly no reason other than because they look "cool". Just like Max Payne, Ramiro can jump in any direction while pumping tons of rounds into bad guys in a split second's time, but can also bounce off walls, do cartwheels and backflips like Neo the Second on a bad day. All these moves have the cheesiest names imaginable, most involving the word "loco", and are so often referred to as "spicy move" that, after a couple of hours into the game, you'll feel like smashing the CD against the nearest wall, and console with it.

You also have access to a number of special moves that you need to collect tokens to use, such as the "Tornado" where you leap into the air, rotate like a twister and lay waste to nearby bad guys, guns ablaze, "Ranging Bull" that sends you into a controllable headlong rush, somehow wasting everyone in your path with the top of your noggin, a Mexican wrestler who aids you by attacking any nearby enemies, or "El Mariachi" which straight gives you the Antonio Banderas-style guns in the guitar cases from the titular Robert Rodriguez film. All these moves are extremely powerful, allowing you to easily blow away most enemies, even the most difficult bosses.

The artificial intelligence is not exactly bursting with intelligence. Enemies will sometimes run around in circles, as if having forgotten what they were doing there, shooting at nothing in particular, or they'll get stuck in parts of the scenery. They mostly have numbers on their side, but even when they do manage to kill you, you can use the game's "rewind" feature to just reverse time a few seconds and avoid death, in which case you get three quarters of your life-bar back. Rewinding can be done using special tokens which, fortunately, are quite plentiful, but the game is also absolutely rife with save points, so you'll almost never find yourself having to repeat a lengthy section of the game. However, in the rare instances that you do, it is very annoying.

There isn't a spoonful of realism in the entire game and the producers seem to have a quarrel with the laws of physics. A bus on a frozen lake would control more smoothly than the vehicles in this game; luckily they are simply an optional means to an end, rather than a required piece of equipment for a mission, and there are only a few sections that require you to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, and then only for short distances.

Video and sound Total Overdose is one ugly buggy game. Everything has a very low polygon count, the character models look blocky and are poorly animated, the town's inhabitants appear out of thin air and dive out of the way of cars that aren't anywhere near them, cars sometimes drive into pieces of the scenery and remain stuck there, and the list goes on and on. In fact, the game doesn't even seem to be finished. How else could I possibly explain occasional falling through the scenery, into the endless void outside the game's boundary?

The voice acting, as I mentioned before, is awful, all the dialogue terribly cheesy and downright comical, albeit unintentionally so. However, Latino rap music complements the hard-edged tone of the game perfectly, and a number of action sequences' kicking in with random bits of flamenco guitars and mariachi tunes set an almost comedic contrast to the constant shooting and wanton destruction. The sound effects for the weapons, explosions and whatnot are nowhere near exceptional, but do a decent job of delivering a somewhat credible experience.

Multiplayer It doesn't have multiplayer.

Conclusion Shooter fans looking for something brainless and easy, with plenty of violence and buckets of blood might be mildly entertained. For those with slightly more-discerning tastes, the game has absolutely nothing to offer.

story 4
gameplay 7
concept 6
graphics 6
audio 6
multiplayer 0
final rating 5.9
Editor's review
poor
 
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