Total Overdose

Total Overdose isn't fooling anybody, neither is it trying to. One look at the game leaves little doubt that the designers had Grand Theft Auto on their minds, and that's not the half of it. If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, the praise has been spread around well. The game takes its "inspiration" from a number of recent AAA titles. Not such a bad idea in itself, the challenge Total Overdose struggles to overcome is creating something distinctively its own.

As the name implies, Total Overdose doesn't hold back much, except when it comes to the story framework that should hold it all together. Instead, it languishes in no-man's land between being serious and tongue-and-cheek, and that makes it just come off as silly. The setup goes that your dad was a DEA agent who mysteriously died south of the border. Your brother, the good son, who also joined the force, has been investigating the case undercover, but he gets injured. That leaves you, his twin, to get an early parole from prison to pick up the trail.

It's pretty stock Saturday morning cable B-movie stuff, but lacks any real personality. Rather than build a connection with your main character to carry it off, Total Overdose lays on a far too thick layer of clichéd, over-played Hispanic culture references. Some of it would have created just the right atmosphere, but the overuse here quickly wears thin and, frankly, to some may come off as offensive. A couple of comments about the bandito's hair you just blew away being greasier than his food go a long way.

In spite of the overplayed premise there are several hours of fun gunplay to be had here. The game (and the rest of this review for that matter) is a virtual library of popular action games over the past couple of years. While it may resemble GTA, the actual action of the game takes a decidedly Max Payne approach -- complete with the time-slowing "bullet time" effect. On missions you'll be dual-wielding pistols, rifles and shoguns while acrobatically diving all over the place dishing out the lead.

Grafted onto that is the stylish action feel of games like the Devil May Cry series. Doing specific tricks and stunts together you pull off special named moves (with the obligatory silly names such as a "burrito blast" or "gringo frenzy"). And these, in turn, can be chained together by killing your next victim before a timer expires. There also are a series of canned "loco moves." But since they only require the push of a button the trigger, these add little to the action other than a pretty stunt. Even the Prince (of Persia) gets in on the action, loaning his handy rewind time trick to save you.

And needless to say there is the Grand Theft Auto-supplied free-roaming city and mission structure. Even the car stunts and power-up icon collection are here as well. Like Tommy Vercetti, you'll have the option of taking on side missions as you like along the way of following the story, or you can just mess around in the city. While you don't have to take any of them, it behooves you to do at least some of the side missions to win some upgrades. The encouragement to get you carefully choreographing each gun battle is three tiers of rewards waiting at the end of each mission to be earned by piling up the points.

When it works, Total Overdose is a surreal blur of bullets keeping time to the merengue. But for each of those moments there are an equal number that run together into an indistinguishable mush of gunning down guys in sombreros to Latino rap. And no matter how well done mechanically, no quantity of these can not give this Tin Man the heart it so desperately needs. Without that glue to bring it together as a cohesive new experience of its own, Total Overdose lacks the identity of the games it seeks to emulate. The individual parts are every bit as enjoyable as they were in their own original games, but nothing more.