If you like shooting indiscriminately at everything that moves, and don't mind Spanish rock too much, you'll like this.
Lactose-intolerant? Look away now. This game's story is extremely cheesy.(Not a bad line,eh?) Some parts of this game would make Leon Kennedy blush. Our story is based around Ram, the brother of a DEA agent who is injured and put out-of-action while investigating the mysterious death of his father, a former DEA agent himself. Desperate to get justice, Ram is sent by his brother as a stand-in DEA agent, who, conveniently, doesn't have to play by the rules. This freedom coupled with an attitude as bad as the story, and heads really do start to roll.
Ram is blessed with the ability to defy gravity, much like his brother and father before him. Jumping in slow-motion through the air, flipping off walls, it's all here. What makes this even better is, pull off one of these moves whilst dishing out some lead-poisioning, and you get the lovely message ' SPICY MOVE! ' with the name of said move, which is usually some not-so-clever pun. There's an assortment of power-ups, with varying degrees of usefulness. The game doesn't really let you die, as laying around are another kind of item called the Rewind, which works like Full Auto's rewind system. A large range of weapons are at your disposal, from pistols to a big, green rocket-launcher. Transport isn't exactly glamorous, but it gets the job done.(You can also open the car door, jump out of the car while shooting, and if the vacant car happens to roll( and I mean it, as slowly as possible ) into another road-user, the car explodes! Way-hey!) There is a sort of police force to stop you from creating mass mayhem, but they're a push-over at best. There are plenty of pedestrians too, who are just waiting to be scraped off your wind-shield, or minced by your assault rifle.
There are an assortment of story missions, that piece together your rise through Mexico City's underworld as you try to find out who was responsible for your father's death. The story missions are really just shoot, shoot, shoot, press that button, shoot again, which does get boring after a while if you do have something better to do with your life. The locations you travel to do make up for these short comings some what, as they're varied and the hencemen do change around in weaponary, appearance and number, but not necessarily intelligence. Graphics-wise, it's pretty standard, with the visuals neither wowing or sickening. The frame does drop occasionally though, but it's nothing awful.
Sound-wise, there is some cool Spanish music, from Delinquent Habits, and other men shouting in gruff voices. But, more notably, some sound bites from Goldeneye 64 are in place, which kept me laughing for a long while.
The problems with Total Overdose are really with the main-structure of the experience. The slow-motion dives often result in some annyoing accidents, as levels (such as a train shoot-out later in the game) lack some invisible barriers, and it's not too fun when Ram jumps in the wrong direction and falls to his death. The nice Rewind feature is rarely used other than in these silly cases, as the game is fairly easy. Cars handle like ice-cream vans, it really wouldn't have been much to refine the car handling, would it Eidos? There is no real enemy intelligence, they're just given bigger weapons and more are piled into a level. And it just gets a bit too standard when all is said and done. Eidos have tried to bolster the lasting-appeal with a commendable amount of side-missions, but there isn't really much of a desire to play after the story mode, which has one of the most anti-climatic endings I've ever witnessed.
Total Overdose isn't a bad game, in just isn't very good. It's a shrug-the-shoulders kind of game, which is fine for me, I bought it for 9 euros, but I don't recommend it if you see it for any more than 20 euro/ dollars / pounds. A quick fling of a game, it offers okay shooting, a fair story mode and a 'meh' experience.