The game plays as a third-person cover-based shooter. You’ll duck for cover, poke your head out, and, as per the on-screen instructions “shoot everything that moves”. Cover is destructible for both you and your various enemies, making shootouts all about timing and precision.

Unfortunately, precision is simply not possible with the overly fidgety controls. While the cover system is well-implemented, someone over at D3 thought it would be a great idea to make the “engage cover” and “disengage cover” commands both reliant on the A button, so you’ll awkwardly lumber out in the middle of a firefight when you were really trying to hide behind that huge hulking column.

On paper, the cover system sounds impressive, especially for a non-AAA title. Matt can sprint from one piece of cover to the next with the press of a button, he can aim with considerable dexterity from cover, and he can sidle nimbly to get those out-of-reach shots. Unfortunately, all the nimble moves in the world won’t save you if the aiming is broken and the control scheme just generally, well, sucks. You won’t believe how many times you’ll legitimately line up a perfect headshot, only to miss 16 times in a row – utterly inexplicably. You’ll watch helplessly as Matt runs right out in front of gunfire when you intended for him to dive for the relative safety of a craps table.

Aside from the unnecessary frustration, the game is incredibly repetitive. There’s absolutely no strategy to the firefights – despite the apparent variety of enemy types, the AI is completely brain dead throughout. You’ll use the same strategies against the cowboys and the Russians and all the other henchmen – you take cover, pop out, shoot, rinse and repeat. It all becomes achingly dull by the third level or so.

Boss battles do add a bit of spice to the formula, though the crappy controls and occasional reliance on Quick Time Event-style button mashing are disappointing. It’s undeniably cool and funny that you’re fighting baddies like a Japanese RPG dude with spiky hair who speaks in text bubbles (Cloud Strife, anyone?), so why can’t the fights be as fun as the cut scenes proceeding them?

The humor is fun – but it’s not exactly gut-bustingly funny. This is dumb parody of the “Scary Movie” sort – instead of really attacking the premise with any sort of grace, the designers instead opted for the “throw every reference you can imagine” approach, with a rather obvious (and frankly, kind of lame) script. The result is a game that will make you smile, but it probably won’t make you laugh, unless you are incredibly amused by the idea of a videogame that makes fun of videogames.

Take the recently released House of the Dead: Overkill. Here, we have an experience that is completely hilarious, precisely because it gets the little details just right. Overkill satirizes horror/schlock/comedy (think Planet Terror) by getting the comic timing just right, offering totally hilarious plot twists, and setting the mood with everything from the wacky elevator funk that underscores the zombie blasting to the finely honed art of your character’s F-bombs. By contrast, Matt Hazard just goes for the broad strokes humor and the obvious jokes. It’s the difference between saying “hey, look! A clichéd hot girl with a gun!” (As in Eat Lead) and twisting the stereotype by making the hot girl the prostitute sister of a wheelchair bound genius, like Overkill does.

Matt Hazard would’ve been a much better game as a straight up first person shooter (with a simpler, easier to manage control scheme) or better yet – if it actually incorporated all of the game styles it makes fun of. Imagine how cool it would’ve been to play an actual 2D platformer/shooter instead of just “Wolfensteining” the graphics. At least that approach would’ve afforded some variety.

If I could give a few points for effort, I would. Matt Hazard’s designers clearly tried to do something interesting here, and the basic concept of a videogame action star as a washed-up Hollywood type is really quite cool. If only the game actually lived up to its premise.

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