Eat Lead spends most of it's playtime poking fun at other games. How ironic then, that the joke is on Eat Lead.
First and foremost, the level design is less than desirable, it's warehouse after mansion that looks suspiciously like a warehouse. The levels are laid out so that you can go from firefight to firefight dipping in and out of cover without an issue, and for the most part that works okay. It just feels like most of the levels were cut and paste, and then re-skinned to look different.
The mediocre level design might be okay if the AI kept you on your toes but most of the time the enemies get stuck into two modes (stand still, or run fill tilt at poor Max Hazard.) The combat boils down to hiding behind a crate and lining up head shots on unmoving enemies, which gets kind of dry. Once you are done gunning down all the henchmen in the level you get to fight a boss. And more often than not, it's just frustrating. Getting killed in one shot, or having mines thrown into you from behind can make for some controller throwing moments, to be sure.
It's not all bad times in the world of Eat Lead, however. There are lots of different varieties of enemies, who drop lots of fun to shoot guns when they die. You've got everything from pistols to energy guns to water guns, to a terrible grenade launcher. A lot of the characters you run into along the way are interesting, or at least good for a laugh. The achievements are also fun to unlock, and fairly well thought out.
Eat Lead is the kind of game that has an amazing concept, good voice talents, and funny jokes. Somewhere along the line, I think the developers forgot they were making a game. When it takes less than 10 hours to play through, and seems boring at times when I'm playing though it for the first time, I can't help but only recommend this for a rental.