El Matador - for PC
So, I just finished playing the first couple levels of a game called El Matador. I’d never heard of it, like ever, but saw the title and decided to try it.
You play some sort of DEA officer, starting in Miami and quickly moving on to Colombia. The game was listed as “stealth action”, but they must have a different definition of stealth than I do. Perhaps theirs is more along the lines of “shoot waves of people”. Anyway, it’s a 3rd person shooter.
It actually looks pretty good, and runs pretty well even on my aging system. The shadows are very granular without AA, so you should try to run it with that on.
The controls are pretty standard, but could have used a few extras. Namely, leaning and a freaking flashlight. I usually have a flashlight, and I’m not hunting armed retards in dark hallways.
The game features bullet time, implemented almost identically to Max Payne. It isn’t as useful as Max’s, but the gauge refills pretty quickly. You start off with a pistol of some kind and an AK. I found the choice of the AK odd for an American force, but what the hell do I know? The first room isn’t too hard, but there’s a lot of shooting and none of the hand holding typically found in any game these days. So, that’s good so far. Assault weapons, straight into action, and the ability to slow it down to line those shots up. Nice.
Then I started dying. A lot. So did my men, but they can only kill a guy if they’re all shooting at him for about a minute, so, ya’ know, that’s negligible. The guys shooting were plenty challenging, all on their own, but it was the grenades that almost made me not want to see the next stage. I can understand a group of hardcore criminals having between, say, 1 and 6 grenades, but an unrelenting barrage of them is unacceptable. And they’re cripplingly powerful, destroying legions of men. Until I get one, then they’re like K-Mart grenades or something. Maybe my cop hands are all sweaty and the moisture reduces their strength. I don’t know.
Eventually I make it through the death zone and end up under the building, which was a club of some kind. The dispatch lady is all freaked out, saying “We don’t have any floorplans for beneath the building!”, which was retarded since it isn’t like I had a map or guide of any kind up to this point. Oh, and the voices aren’t that bad, but the dialogue is best left to the imagination.
So, kill more dudes, get more ammo. There’s some kind of boss battle with a guy in a stairwell. Wasn’t all that hard and I got a machine gun out of the deal.
More dudes. Find some chick, leave the other cop with her. Fight another boss. This guy was King Hippo tubby, but running around like a meth-chicken, so I unloaded the machine gun on him.
So on. Find a dead DEA team at the bottom of what appears to be a well. I can only imagine that the script of the game punished them into self-awareness, and into the merciful arms of group suicide.
Last boss battle for the intro level. This guy is a skinny, sort of fruity albino man in a white suit, with a pretty ordinary looking pistol. Thus far it takes at least 4 uzis or better to take me down, not that such a situation is rare or anything. Still. He leans around the corner (that bastard is rubbing it in my eye!), and shoots. All of my armor evaporates. What the hell? Who made this gun? Satan? God himself? Is this man the chosen one gone wrong? Whatever the case I end up quickloading time after time. Finally the AK of Justice and all 5 of my sad grenades take him down.
Then you go to Bogota for some reason, and inevitably end up shooting a lot of people. The dialogue here is awful, but the action has been less annoying.
Pros-
Cheap. You can grab this thing for like $6 off Amazon. No, I’m not linking to it, find it yourself.
Entertainingly fast paced, very arcade style gameplay.
Cons-
Very arcade style. You die constantly.
Can’t lean, so you have to do special dances with the mouse to see exactly how many dudes will be killing you.
When you reload a save, your weapons always default to burst fire. Seeing as burst fire makes you a millionty percent less accurate, this is not something I desire.
Anyway, if you’re bored and come across this title, try it out. If you crave hearing lines that make the latest Die Hard sound like, well, a somewhat better movie, then feel free to order it. I think there’s a demo out there somewhere too.