For those of you who aren’t already familiar, a quick discussion of terms before I settle into a discussion of today’s game, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard.  The term in question is the term “meta”.  Meta, essentially, means relating to but not directly in a specific segment.  For instance, if you’ve seen any old Samurai Pizza Cats anime where the main characters talk about calling their agents when things go really wrong, that’s a kind of meta.

And a whole new kind of meta in this case goes to Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard.  See, what it’s about is title character Matt Hazard.  He’s one of the biggest names in gaming, easily on par with your Duke Nukems.  He’s not quite a Mario but he’s been around that long–definitely an A-lister if not necessarily top of the heap.  Anyway, following a slew of disastrous titles clearly meant as nothing more than cash cows–including a kart racing game and a shooter revolving around water guns called Soak’Em (like SOCOM, har!)–Matt was summarily let go.  But it didn’t take long for a new CEO to take interest in Matt Hazard, and offer him a comeback.  But it’s not the kind of comeback Hazard envisioned.

As a game, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard may be described as one of those games that actively hates you.  It’s a fairly standard action shooter game, third person in nature, where you run around and blast stuff as you have done for so many times before.  In fact, the game will take an especial pleasure in cheating, including dropping loads of enemies to take you out faster than you can recover, and of course, spawning enemies BEHIND you to chew you up before you can turn around to engage them.  The rest of the time, you’ll run, and gun, and get shot plenty of times.  But these irksome and tiresome points are greatly counterbalanced by really, REALLY, fun cut scenes.  I mean REALLY fun cut scenes.  There are a legion of parodies and injokes and assorted whatnot going on around here that’ll keep your attention all the way through.  It’s actually mostly worth it to slog through the tired action game to get to the next fun video or clever injoke.

Mostly, of course, because the game itself isn’t a whole lot in the way of fun, but what’s going on AROUND the game is plenty of fun. They even got celebrity voices–yes, that IS Will Arnett of Arrested Development fame handling the voice of Matt Hazard.  Good catch.  And if you further recognize Wallace “Wally” Wellesley as Neil Patrick Harris of Harold and Kumar fame, give yourself another twenty geek points because you are AWESOME.

Thus the question is up to you–how much crap are you willing to put up with for the sake of a good time?  If the answer is “plenty”, then go get a copy of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard because you will have a great time with at least parts of it.  Everyone else might prefer, meanwhile, to stay away.