Comedy can be the hardest element of a package to judge critically, due to its highly subjective nature. Fortunately, Eat Lead makes this easy, because it's pretty much non-existent. How the creators have the gall to bill this as a parody of the industry is utterly incredible. There are indeed nods to other titles, but nothing ever comes close to resembling a joke or punchline. Simply acknowledging that other games exist is neither clever nor insightful and references to other releases are cursory at best. It reeks of design by committee, with no overarching attitude or style. The few genuine attempts at humour that do exist are scattered infrequently across the game and smack of a childish simplicity that does nothing more than aggravate the player. For example, at one point Matt comes across a space marine wearing a chef's hat who's called, surprisingly enough, Master Chef. The developers don't bother to do anything more with this, apparently the simple observation that the word Chief is very similar to Chef is supposed to make you laugh.

When you think about how many iconic games there have been over the years, it's clear there is a wealth of opportunity for creating a varied, diverse experience. Each level could focus on a different famous game with lots of in-jokes and game mechanics tailored specifically to that section. Instead, the designers have produced a collection of generic, drab warehouses and industrial areas that would have been bland and tired a decade ago. This is all wrapped in dull palettes of washed-out greys and browns. It all merges into one long, drawn out, monotonous affair, with the boundaries between levels blurring together from the utter banality and repetitiveness of it all. It’s a shocking waste of potential given the interesting concept behind the game.

In fact, the whole experience comes of as rather insulting. The designers thought it was a good idea to combine all of the worst elements of the shooter genre. As if that wasn't enough, the game likes to point out each of its deficiencies as you play, as if that somehow makes them acceptable. What kind of person thinks it is a good idea to design levels with the express purpose of winding the player up? These kinds of pretentious attempts at irony are littered throughout – even one of the achievements mocks the lack of any multiplayer modes. At one point, late in the game, an artificially long elevator sequence is inserted in reference to the infamous ones in Mass Effect. While tolerable in a title of that calibre, it's inexcusable and downright infuriating to have to sit through it in this, particularly given that there's no technical need for it.

Visually, the game is comparable to an early PS2 or XBox release, featuring terribly plain textures with no lighting or particle affects to keep things interesting. Character models animate awkwardly, with a rigid and unnatural look. The game does have one nice idea: players occasionally warping between locations in real time; but these events are rare, limited purely to cut-scenes. There’s also no real attempt to match the geometry layout between switch-overs, which makes them look somewhat amateurish. Most criminal of all, however, is the sheer obviousness of the way the level designers have rigidly kept to the square grid in the level editor. Practically everything from the boxy rooms and corridors to the environment objects such as chairs, tables and packing crates are aligned at right angles to each other. This is sheer laziness on their part and it looks shockingly simplistic and artificial. This kind of design would have been considered dated years ago.

The flow is slow, dull and repetitive. Levels take the form of a number of large rectangular rooms with simplistic cover layouts, interspersed with tight, cramped corridor sections. Each large room will spawn several waves of enemies against the player, with absolutely no consistency in enemy types. The AI's usage of cover is heavily scripted and based solely on a couple of possible player positions, often leaving them in clear line-of-sight regardless. The whole thing stinks of deja vu and it's not long before it really starts to drag. It feels like each of the large areas ultimately plays out exactly like the last – it's just boring.

When it comes to actually dispatching these woefully inadequate foes, the gun mechanics cause the game to fall flat on its face. The damage caused by the pistols is so great, the recoil on the automatic weapons so high and the range of shotguns so short, that the pistols far outweigh the effectiveness of everything else in the game. When your supposedly weakest weapon is actually the most powerful, you know a game hasn‘t been thoroughly tweaked by the developers. The tired nature of the gun-play and general arbitrariness of enemy placement and attack patterns makes for a game that feels drawn out and stuffed with filler content. It’s like the developers have done the bare minimum of design and just scattered enemies at random throughout the dreary, cookie-cutter environments, whilst picking any old inputs for their gun calibration algorithms. One reasonable idea the designers had was the ability to point to a piece of cover and press the Y button to cause Matt to run to it. Just like everything else, though, the implementation of this has been botched, because it can only be utilised if the player is already latched onto cover – an utterly unnecessary limitation.

It’s the boss battles that really set Hazard apart from all the other bargain-bin releases out there. These are, without exception, some of the poorest sequences you’ll have seen in years. Some are simply a series of tired quick-time events featuring little to no pacing. Others are based around shooting out various clearly marked weak-points, all the while being assaulted by endlessly respawning enemies. The bosses will typically just sit there and wait for you to take them down while all this is going on, with the only challenge coming from the enemies that appear on all sides of you. In each of these, the player is given only a tiny area within which to manoeuvre, offering little in the way of potential tactics. Like much of the game, these battles are uninspired and utterly soul destroying to sit through.

Eat Lead is an outdated relic, it does nothing original or creative with the wealth of diverse, high-quality source material available to it. Providing instead the definition of bad game design by combining all of the direst elements from across the medium and putting them together in one neat package. The so-called comedy elements, be they good or bad, are nowhere to be found, and the developers have utterly squandered what is actually quite a strong concept. Even worse, not content with producing a bad game, the developers have actually tried to wind the player up by pointing out its many flaws as a `joke‘. It feels like the whole experience is at the player’s expense. Near the end of the game some enemies will shout, “You’re so last gen, Hazard!” The thing is, Eat Lead would have been just as awful and outdated back then. There is nothing to like about this mess of a release and the only joke here is how it made it into the shops.