El Matador

El Matador is a third-person shooter pitting you against South American drug lords in a series of drawn-out firefights. The game feels a lot like Max Payne in that you have access to copious amounts of weapons and ammo and you even have a bullet-time ability to help you in the more hairy moments of combat. Unfortunately, the El Matador lacks the style and flair of Max Payne, and is instead little more than a half-baked knock-off of the latter. Not only that, but the game suffers from poorly-implemented AI and a host of other problems. All things considered, El Matador doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done (and better) in the past several years.

El Matador puts you in control of DEA Agent Victor Corbett as he and his team fight their way through South American drug lords and their countless hordes of cronies. The stages are typically divided into big gun battles where you and your team push your way to a ludicrous boss battle against the main drug lord.

To say that El Matador was inspired by Max Payne would be a vast understatement. The game borrows extremely heavily from Max Payne’s gameplay, taking the elements like environmental physics and bullet-time and applying them to the game’s storyline. On the plus side, the game’s controls are pretty solid, with a quick and easy aiming option that only requires you to hold down the right mouse button to aim properly, similar to the great aiming system in Call of Duty.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the pluses end for the game. El Matador suffers from extremely repetitive gameplay and very lousy AI. You go from firefight to firefight with little space in between. If the shoot-outs were a little more exciting, this wouldn’t really be a problem. Unfortunately, the AI is just bad, so these can be extremely frustrating. Enemies will stand out in the open firing away at you and your squadmates, making them seemly easy targets. However, this isn’t the case, as their aim is downright impeccable, and they’ll hit you everytime. Even though you can withstand a ton of bullets in your person, it’s pretty easy to go down quickly due to the frustrating AI.

The bullet-time element is also pretty weak. When you activate it, time slows down for everyone but you, giving you the upper hand in theory. Unfortunately, the way that it is executed here shows this not to be the case. The whole screen goes wonky when you start it up, making it extremely difficult to see your enemies. When you’ve got several baddies surrounding you from multiple areas, not being able to see them properly makes for some more undue frustration. Therefore, most of the time, the bullet-time element is more of a hindrance than a help.

Graphically, El Matador feels old. While there are some good elements, like some nice looking lighting effects and environments, it just doesn’t look that impressive when compared to the current crop of games with comparable system requirements.

The sound is also more of a miss than a hit. While the voice acting is pretty decent, the script is just lousy, making the dialogue cheesier than it should be for a game that takes itself so seriously. Also, the soundtrack is borderline grating, with annoyingly repetitious techno songs lining it out.

El Matador is derivative, half-baked, and most of the time extremely frustrating. Even if you see this one in the bargain bin, just keep on looking.

Gameplay: 5.0
With lousy AI and gameplay elements that were done better years ago, El Matador is very disappointing.

Graphics: 6.5
If it had come out three years ago, there’s a chance that El Matador could’ve been a real sweet-looking game, but nowadays it just can’t compete.

Sound: 6.0
A lousy script kills the dialogue, and the euro-techno soundtrack is repetitive and annoying.

Difficulty: Medium

Concept: 4.5
Dude, were it not for Max Payne already existing, this game would totally rock! ...Kidding.

Overall: 5.0
Extremely derivative and half-baked, El Matador fails to bring anything new to the table.