El Matador review

Not the type with the porcine friends and the honey collection though - the type which mauls everything in reach before being shot repeatedly by a park ranger and blown up with a grenade for good measure.

The game starts at 100 miles per hour, throwing you directly into the action without really explaining who you are or what your motives are supposed to be. You play Victor Corbett - a DEA special agent, in the Jack Bauer “shoot first and don’t really bother to ask questions” mould. After wiping out an entire battalion of gangsters in a Mexican hotel, Victor is shipped off to Colombia to help deal with the drug world’s crime bosses in his own, bloody way.

Bad Cop, Bad Cop

By the time this first explanatory cut-scene arrives, it is clear that El Matador is a derivative of Remedy Entertainment’s noir action masterpiece, Max Payne. It is a third person shooter, complete with hordes of enemies, an arsenal that not even the baggiest of leather coats should be able to conceal, and most importantly, bullet time and shoot-dodge. Maybe it is unfair to claim that any third person game which invokes the use of bullet time is mimicking Max Payne, but El Matador clearly is.

However, the gameplay mechanics are where the similarities end. While Payne’s investigations were conducted in urban wastelands and seedy clubs, Corbett’s assignments take place in the barrios of Bogotá and the surrounding jungle. Unfortunately the opportunity to make beautiful environments like those of Far Cry has been squandered. El Matador claims to feature HDR lighting among its graphical bells and whistles but even with every setting enabled the game looks about three years old.

A bullet in the brain

This is nothing compared to the in-game music though. A single piece of ever-present, looping techno dominates the game’s aural landscape – a hideous monolith, obliterating all thought and most of the sound effects to the point that the only option is to turn it off completely.

Once you do that, however, El Matador becomes a lot more playable, mainly because that thumping headache it induces ceases to be a factor. The silence also allows for the appreciation of the game’s sound effects – dogs barking, cars passing, people shouting in the distance. In fact, the barrios which form the early part of the game sound rather lifelike, or would do if it weren’t for the continual gun battles raging in the streets.

The only other problem with the game in this sense is the enemies’ constant need to shout obscenities at you – not because it is out of place or unnecessarily offensive, but because it gives away their position, something which any hardened criminal should know is particularly stupid when faced with a rampaging policeman who, until that moment, was unaware of their existence.

On the harder difficulty settings however, this is all that keeps El Matador from becoming nearly impossible to complete. While it is now the norm to see enemies dodging behind cover or lobbing the occasional grenade, El Matador features AI with a nasty habit of hitting what it aims at. It is therefore vital to use such tactics yourself to avoid a swift demise, and charging blindly into a room on even the standard difficulty setting is likely to cause just that. Your fellow officers on the other hand are annoyingly incompetent, leaving most of the dirty work to you. Worse, they are either invulnerable or scripted to suffer an inescapable bloody end.

What good is a phone call if... you’ve been shot in the face?

El Matador’s greatest problem however is its utter moral reprehensibility. Most mission objectives start out along the lines of "Capture drug-lord [Juan Carlos Gringo]", but quickly change to "wipe out everything that moves, and blow some stuff up while you’re at it". In fact, at the start of one mission the commanding officer utters the line "There’s no way they'll surrender. We have to kill them all". While Payne’s acts were unilateral and driven by desperation, with psychosis closing in all around, Corbett breezes though his assignments with complete emotional detachment. I’m hardly going to start preaching family values and good will unto all at this point, but a game in which the police are ordered to kill everyone they come up against and don’t question it strikes a wrong chord with me.

It could be assumed from all this that the developers of El Matador rather missed the point of Max Payne. It lacks that intriguing narrative thread, the sense of depressed desperation, Payne’s conscience – knowing what he did was wrong, but being too far down the hole to care. The action sequences, the bullet time – these were thing that made Max Payne fun, but it was the noir style that made it great. Take that away and you are left with some mildly entertaining but ultimately vacuous fluff. And that is precisely what El Matador is.