Torrente Hands-On Impressions

The third-person-shooter genre is absolutely rife with stories of hard-edged, no-nonsense cops whose typically unbecoming methods of fighting crime--while looked down upon by the top police brass--still manage to get results. Everywhere you look, there's a Max Payne or a Jack Slate looking to fight crime by any means necessary. However, it's safe to say that for as many of these games as there have been in recent years, you've still never encountered a character like Torrente. Originally debuting in a series of highly popular films in Spain, Torrente is a self-described fascist, sexist, racist, drunk, and dirty cop--like something of a cross between Dennis Franz on NYPD Blue and John Turturro's "The Jesus" character from The Big Lebowski. In Torrente the game, you take Madrid's most notorious crime fighter through more than 60 different levels, fighting off drug cartels and mafia types while swearing, boozing, and shooting along the way.

Torrente's basic gameplay should be pretty familiar territory for anyone who has ever played a PC shooter. You can walk forward or backward, strafe from side to side, crouch (using the keyboard), and aim and shoot your guns (using the mouse). The mission structure in the game seems to be pretty straightforward from the first few levels we've played. The initial mission presented a scenario that had a number of explosive devices set around Madrid, and it was up to us to find and disarm them. Of course, to do this, we had to get past all the random thugs and crooks wandering around the streets. We were given a map of how to get to the first bomb at the beginning of the level, and then off we went. Though the levels had multiple paths that we could take, it became quite apparent, right off the bat, where we needed to go--because the correct way was littered with bad guys. Though there were quite a few baddies coming at us at once, apparently our man Torrente is quite the tough guy. As a result, bullets only seemed to inflict a minimal amount of damage. However, one or two shots from us was all it took to kill a baddie.

As we killed the masses of crooks that were coming at us, we would periodically acquire their weapons. There will be more than 14 weapons to choose from in the game, ranging from random blunt objects, like two-by-fours and pipes, to more typical armaments, like pistols, Uzis, shotguns, and grenade launchers. A small, red targeting reticle appears in front of you at all times, although occasionally, enemies will be too far away to hit. We also noticed a few enemies getting stuck behind objects, like cars and walls, and even though we could see them, we couldn't kill them until we got significantly closer.

The game's 60 levels are broken up into different chapter-sections. The first chapter, for example, features five different level segments. We didn't note much in the way of exposition in the levels we tried, save for a very basic setup with a voice-over from Torrente himself. For the most part, it seems that the game's primary point is just to plop you down in a level and have you get from point A to point B while killing everything that gets in your way.

Torrente's look is a pretty simplistic one. The game's environments, while reasonably representative of a major city (in this case, Madrid), aren't especially high on detail or polish. The building and set-piece designs look a bit on the archaic side, and, aside from the fact that they do drive around and create traffic, the city's cars don't look very good--nor do they inflict any sort of damage when they hit you. The character model for Torrente definitely looks the part, with his large, balding head, thick moustache, and cheap suit. Rarely do you ever see much in the way of animation from him, aside from the typical run-and-shoot animations, but if you complete a mission objective, you'll get to see him do a fun, little flamenco-esque dance. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Torrente's presentation is its dialogue. Specifically, Torrente himself is utterly foul-mouthed and hilariously sleazy. The game in no way tries to take itself seriously, which leads to a lot of silly sexual innuendo and a lot of Spanish-accented exclamations of the "F" word for no particularly good reason. It's weird stuff, but it's also pretty funny.

From our time spent with Torrente, we still aren't quite sure what to make of it. The actual gameplay seems pretty rudimentary (almost to a fault), but the game's sense of humor almost makes up for this. As Torrente has already seen a European release, it seems unlikely that too much will change between now and the US release that's scheduled for later this year. However, we'll still hold off on making any real judgments until our full review has been performed. Stay tuned for more on Torrente and his filthy mouth in the near future.