Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
On paper, Eat Lead is a great idea. A comedic send-up of established video game tropes, tied together by a parodic fourth-wall-breaking story, should be good even if the gameplay sucks. And it does suck! As with Kane & Lynch, I knew going in that the game was, metrically, bad. The shooting mechanics are not as offensively awful as in K&L - Eat Lead actually has a halfway-respectable cover system, somewhat marred by glitchy controls. It also has ridiculous difficulty settings (impossibly easy or impossibly impossible), retarded level design, wave after wave of mindless enemies, and disappointingly uninspired weapons.
Anyway! Like I was saying, this would be fine if the game was as funny as something starring (the voice of) Will Arnett should be. But the writing is terrible. One or two genuinely funny moments aside, the majority of the game's scenarios, dialog, and pratfalls are just lame. Not even lowbrow, just, not funny. "Master Chef?" Really? Come on.
The tragic flaw of Eat Lead is that it "makes fun of" stupid game design decisions by doing them. The design doc for this was probably a riot. But in actually executing it, the game misses the point! Running around in circles because you can't find the exit; waiting for a pointless loading screen; lazily headshotting zombies for minutes at a time - these are funny when they happen to someone else.
The upshot is that the game is obscenely short. I'm maybe four hours in now, and should be finished in another one, two tops.
Progress: Finished the boat level