Total Overdose: A Gunslinger’s Tale in Mexico is a 2005 PC, PS2 and Xbox sandbox shooter. It’s often called a GTA-clone, but it’s more of a mix of GTA, Max Payne and Tony Hawk. You play as Ramiro “Ram” Cruz, who’s trying to infiltrate the Morales Cartel to find out who was responsible for the death of his father (and also to get his prison sentence removed). There’s a lot of jumping, shooting and casual racism. Also there is music.
How are you playing this?
This is the PC version of the game, purchased from GOG.com. The Let’s Play is post-commentary and I am joined by the lovely trio of El Tipejo Loco, Iron Chitlin and TorpidTypist.
Will you be doing/collecting everything in the game?
I’ll complete all the side quests to get as many unlocks as possible, but due to there being a lot of content that is essentially the same, I will only show off each mission type once. I won’t be getting all collectibles, because there’s really no point to it.
For the longest time, I only knew about this because of ads in Game Informer. For whatever reason, I thought this was going to be a game with linear levels. I was kinda surprised when I bought it on GOG.
After watching the videos, I feel this game has somehow found itself in a twilight zone where it’s simultaneously too over the top and not gonzo enough. Tony Hawk started going big pretty quickly. In the first level of the second game, you could cause a helicopter to destroy part of the hangar. By THUG (which came out two years before this game), you were jumping off a skyscraper over a helicopter.
In Total Overdose, the most out-there thing so far is summoning a luchador to fight hallucinatory trick-or-treaters. While that sounds pretty goofy, it’s not particularly exciting, as we’ve seen. I think a huge problem is that it just looks slow paced. Running looks slow and the enemies take too many bullets to kill unless you do the headshot thing. While the game wants you to feel awesome, you don’t feel particularly effective as you blow up a car and gun down a dozen enemies.
When I see this and think “How could this be fixed?” I can’t help but think about Bulletstorm, because really, if you say “Single-player shooter where you get points for killing people”, you think of that game, not this one. Bulletstorm always has crazy stuff happening and gives you more ways to deal with an enemy than just shooting them. Most importantly, it doesn’t have an empty boring open world. There doesn’t seem to be anything to do in this open world other than shitty stunt jumps and starting side missions and it seems to kill the pacing.
Ultimately, the pace and presentation of the game stop it from living up to what the image at the top of the thread promises.
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