Total Overdose is Max Payne with chilli on his shirt, tequila down his throat and half a dozen jalapenos stuffed up his rectum. It's slow-motion running, jumping and shooting with the thickest Hispanic accent this side of a Miami death row jailhouse.
If games that say "Hey, gringo! You wanna shoot some Americano peegs?" sound like your glass of cerveza (that's Spanish for 'beer', language losers) you're onto an absolute winner because, yes! Total Overdose really is as Mexican as dodgy burritos, ten-gallon Sombreros and the kind of bars that make From Dusk Till Dawn's Titty Twister look like a Friends coffee-shop meeting house in the suburbs.
And for the rest of us? Over-heavy Mexican ambience aside, Total Overdose is reasonably entertaining stuff. Robert Rodriguez's Desperado movie done digitally so to speak. Dig a little deeper and it'll even manage to sneak in a couple of surprisingly cool new features on you. So yep: on first impressions, at least, Total Overdose certainly deserves its reputation as a spicylooking shooter.
The story is thus: you, Ramiro Cruz, have been released from jail early on condition that you spend your new found freedom helping your DEA agent brother search out the crime ring responsible for your father's untimely death. Predictably enough, this leads you to the trail of a big Mexican drug smuggling gang and from then on it's a case of infiltrating and destroying it in the noisiest, messiest fashion possible. And the rest, as they say, is blood-soaked, gunpowder-scorched history.
TEQUILA SLAMMER
For the most part Total Overdose is good old, standard third-person action stuff. You run around, you blow stuff up, and you tap a button to make everything slow down, Matrix-style. And it's good stuff too. Slick, responsive, and achingly cool - how many other games let you carry twin sawn-off shotguns, or jump out of moving vehicles, or let you throw a grenade at a group of enemies before whipping out your piece and shooting said pineapple mid-flight? Like we said in the opening paragraph: it's Max Payne on Jose Cuervo.
Such coolness can mostly be attributed to Total Overdose's Combo Timer, a little clock that starts ticking the moment you take out an enemy. Every time you kill an enemy before the clock runs down you'll add another point to the score multiplier and reset the timer in the process. Keep killing people before the time runs out and you'll keep racking up the multiplier; fail, and the clock runs out, the score multiplier resets and you're back to where you started. Meaning the more you kill, the more you score and the more you score the better your rewards at the end of each level.
Got that? Good, because now it gets really interesting. Rather than simply giving you 'lives', as nearly every other action game does, your character Ramiro begins with a finite number of time 'rewinds'. Not only can he use them to save himself from death's dingy door (much like Prince of Persia did), but with clever use, it's possible to keep rewinding time so that you never run out of seconds on the constantly ticking combo timer. Which means, providing you've got the skills to keep the combo timer going, it's possible to rack up some truly demon scores.
THAT'S A SPICY HEADSHOT
What Total Overdose isn't though, as much as it likes to think so, is 'Tony Hawk's with guns'. It's easy to see why you might think it is, but trust us, it really isn't. Depending on how you kill your enemies (head shot, fist to the face, run over by a truck you're driving, all three combined) you'll be awarded a 'move' bonus which can be anything from the
basic 'Spicy Move' to the multi-hombre shattering 'Gringo Frenzy' (see the panel, above). It's cool and fun and the way the move names appear on screen certainly puts us in mind of The Big T. But whereas Tony's moves could all be linked into massive combos, each special move here is a discrete entity, simply there to look cool and add points. Doing a 'Maximum Coolio' might seem ace, but it won't chain directly into a 'Ball Buster'. Then again, lose your chain of kills and let the combo timer go dead and neither will be worth much to you in the way of pointage.
Which leads us to our first main worry: as much as we love the idea of the combo timer, sometimes keeping it going can be more trouble than it's worth. Total Overdose's huge environments might look good on paper, but once you've cleared an area of its set quota of bad guys you'll soon realise its all but impossible to reach the next set of enemies in time to keep the counter going. Bad guys do eventually respawn, so you've always somebody to shoot at, but nowhere near quick enough for that time-hungry ticker.
It's incredibly frustrating, especially when you build up a x20 kill counter only to find that the next nearest target is 30 seconds flat-out running away. Admittedly it's not so bad for some of the smaller, bonus missions that pop up throughout the game, but for the huge plot-based levels you're looking at losing your score multiplier on numerous occasions through no fault of your own. Smaller environments might not go down well with some people, especially in an age when games are obsessed with having huge, free-roaming environments, but at least you can go through each level without ever breaking your combo chain.
LOS SAN ANDREAS
Total Overdose primarily takes place in the fictitious Mexican border town of Los Toros, a kind of general hub from which all other levels are accessed, and it's here the game starts straying dangerously into GTA territory. Although clearly nowhere near as big or as epic as Rockstar's game, the half dozen or so different districts of Los Toros offer plenty of exploring opportunity, meaning it won't be long before you're wandering around, stealing cars, assaulting pedestrians and making a nuisance of yourself.
While it's hard to criticise the developer for taking this approach - who isn't doing their own GTA these days? - we can't help but feel these are the sections where Total Overdose lets itself down most. Empty, boring streets, a distinct lack of variety in the scenery and a general shortage of pedestrians mean that taking time out to just mosey on down in Los Toros is a largely excitementfree experience.
But our main beef with all the freeroaming stuff is that it simply breaks up the flow of the action too much. One minute you're spraying bullets at all and sundry in a frozen meat factory, flicking away brow sweat like a fat bloke in an iron smelting works, the next you're toodling between empty apartment blocks in a quiet end of town. Sorry chaps, but that's just not very exciting.
In the same way that Total Overdose's sprawling environments could have benefited from some serious cutting down at the design stage, so the dodgy GTA inspired bits needn't have been bothered with in the first place. It's all very well offering players freedom of choice, but not at the expense of keeping the fun ball rolling, right? Call us old-fashioned, but we reckon Total Overdose would have worked better if was a much tighter, more linear game altogether.
FAJITA'S YOUR LOT
Graphically it's all a bit plain as well. Cutsequences have a nice, bold, colourful look about them, but the actual game itself - the environments particularly - are nothing special. Nor is the animation that great, some of the hand-to-hand comb moves being woefully poor. That said, you can't knock the cool, Mexican-inspired soundtrack. We can't say we know or even recognise much of it, but the way the authentic Hispanic rock tracks kick in just before the big action scenes really adds some extra tension to the game.
Total Overdose is certainly fun if all you're after is a quick blast and something that doesn't tax your mind meat, but it isn't nearly as multi-faceted as it thinks it is. Which leaves us the dilemma of what to score it. Far too entertaining to be saddled with a 6/10, but it's not quite 8/10 territory either. This is good, honest, gun-slinging fun, just lacking the extra sheen of polish that could really have made Total Overdose sparkle. So that'll be a 7/10 then. Worth a shot, if you like your tequila and all that.
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