El Scorcho!
Ay compadres! Bienvenidos! Today, we celebrate Cinco de Mayo (late) with Total Overdose, a game that’s 100% certifiably Mexican! Arriba!
Wait- what do you mean it was made in Denmark? Like the one in Europe? Are you sure it’s not Denmarko or something? No?
Well, now this whole thing’s just gonna come off as racist.
But what is Cinco de Mayo if not an American-made pseudo holiday that exists just to get drunk? It’s Saint Patrick’s day all over again, but with tequila instead of green beer. If that’s the case, then Total Overdose fits right in! See? I just turned it around and now it’s self-aware and post-modern instead of just racist!
Total Overdose might be about as Mexican as Nacho Libre, but much like that movie, it’s a ton of fun that I’d recommend to anyone. It takes the bullet time diving action of Max Payne, gives it a yellow filter, and ups the intensity. Its levels are shorter, there are more enemies, and all you have to do is blast them. It’s simple, it’s fun, it has a ton of flaws, but it’s still worth checking out.
Read on to find out why Total Overdose is muy caliente! Okay I’ll drop that gimmick now.
Gameplay
Total Overdose: A Gunslinger’s Tale in Mexico (2005), is a third person dive shooter. You know, like Max Payne, WET or Stranglehold. Those games where you dive around like a murderous dolphin, dual-wielding pistols in slow motion. You play as Ramiro Cruz, the early 2000s in human form. He’s out of prison working for the DEA, and he has to solve a case for them by murdering thousands of drug dealers in the most stylish way possible.
The game is straightforward. Each mission has you going to some location that’s full of criminals, and you go through blasting them. There is some attempt at variety, but those are relegated to the side activities, which you have to complete between some missions. At the end of a mission, you get rewards based on your score.
Going up against dozens of armed cartel members is a daunting task, but Cruz is well equipped to handle small armies. You have an arsenal of weapons available, from the basics like pistols, shotguns and rifles, to heavier arms like grenades and rocket launchers. There are also melee weapons. They don’t do much other than give you something more to scroll past while looking for something with ammo.
If your guns aren’t enough, you can whip out a Loco Move. These are super attacks that take out entire rooms of enemies, make you invincible, or summon strange men to fight alongside you. These are limited by stocks, so they act like bombs in a shoot-’em-up. They’re ridiculous and fun to use, and using them is practically required if you want to survive in hard mode. Doing a Loco Move sounds like something Taco Bell would do. Would you like to do a Loco Move and get sour cream on your chips, sir?
The game’s main gimmick is the aforementioned diving. With the push of a button, you can send Cruz into a dolphin dive, which triggers bullet time, and makes you harder to hit. This is essential when going up against angry firing squads. You can jump out from cover, shoot a few dudes, and survive. This is limited by a stamina bar, but it’s generous to the point that it might as well not be there.
There’s a very rudimentary scoring system. It’s similar to the one in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, where each trick has a point value that adds up, and a multiplier that increases with each trick. Every stunt you pull off in Total Overdose has a small point value associated with it, and each kill adds to the multiplier. Getting a high kill combo is the quickest way to a high score, which doesn’t really explore the game’s mechanics, and it doesn’t encourage skilled play. I’ll talk more about the scoring later.
Tacked on to all this is one of the most pointless and boring open worlds I’ve seen in a long time.
This might not sound like much on paper, but it works in practice. The game is simple, but it has enough quirks to keep it interesting. Its style system is a bit basic, but it does what it sets out to do, which is keep you alive while making you look cool. Same with the scoring system. Bare bones, but functional.
To understand some of the game’s missteps, we’ll have to take a closer look at it, starting with the combat.
Combat
The shooting is competent and functional. This isn’t a cover-based shooter, so you’re free to move around, and encouraged to do so. Enemies use hitscan weapons, but they’re inaccurate, and you can dodge them by moving around. The dive move also makes you harder to hit, letting you jump in and out of cover safely.
Unlike other games in this Max Payne-like subgenre, your aim is automatic. Whatever enemy your cursor is near, gets locked on to, and you always fire at that target. It’s made so you can always fire at someone while jumping around, without having to worry about aiming, but this isn’t something to worry about, at least on PC. You never have to aim at anything too precisely, and this sort of thing works on console without lock-on, as seen with Max Payne (even if it had generous bullet magnetism).
It reminds me of the older Grand Theft Auto games, like GTA3 and Vice City, before they switched to free-aim.
This self-imposed mechanical hurdle leads to an interesting system: head shots. Since you can’t freely aim, you can’t aim at someone’s head, so how do you solve that problem? By having a timing-based targeting system. You press the aim button and a reticle closes in on your target’s head. When it’s in the right spot, you shoot and it’s an automatic head shot. This is a neat mini game, which gives you a skill check while fighting, but it has a few wrinkles. Sometimes it doesn’t start when you press the aim button, and the timing for the head shot is weird. Sometimes it feels generous, like you have a half-second window to shoot the guy, but other times you’ll press it with the same timing only for the reticle to reset as if you failed.
Some guns can’t do this headshot, like the shotguns or machine guns. This leads to moments where I was pressing the aim button wondering why the target wasn’t showing up, only to realize I had switched to the spray-and-pray dual Uzis (which can still headshot if you jump at a guy’s head in a specific angle and height). You can head shot with the assault rifle, for some reason, even though it’s not a one shot kill like with the other guns.
Even with the weird head shot system, the combat works well. The auto targeting doesn’t get in the way, it’s smart enough to target enemies in your general area, but it still lets you shoot things you haven’t targeted, like explosive barrels. You can shoot at a guy, aim slightly to the right and hit an explosive barrel, but it won’t stop shooting the guy for anything else. The only downside being that the head shot system is a bit wonky sometimes.
There are also the aforementioned Loco Moves. You activate these like power ups, to gain temporary invincibility and take down enemies. There’s one where you throw an explosive piñata that lures enemies in before detonating, a golden gun that has six shots that kill anything (other than bosses) in one hit, two moves that summon invincible men to fight alongside you, and the tornado, where you spin around and shoot everywhere.
They’re useful. A little too useful sometimes. They’re limited by stocks, so you can’t use them all the time, but the game gives them out like Taco Bell gives out sauce packets. You’re guaranteed to have one on hand, unless you’re spamming them like a maniac. They’re necessary in hard difficulty, but in anything other than that, they’re just a neat luxury. The game’s never hard enough to where you need to use them wisely, if at all.
My personal favorite is the bull charge, which I didn’t mention. When you activate it, Cruz acts like a bull, and runs around, killing anyone he rams into. It looks dumb as hell, but it’s hilarious.
The Loco Moves come with their own janky downsides, too. You can’t use them while doing other stunts. You can’t dolphin dive out of a car and activate a tornado in mid-air for big style points. The other is that they have set activation times, with no way to cancel them. If you activate the bull charge, you’re stuck as an oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee. Which is to say, you’re stuck like that until it runs out. I think that’s what the kids call a humiliation ritual.
Then there’s El Mariachi. You take out two guitar cases with machine guns, like in the movie El Mariachi, and shoot until time runs out. This one leaves you stuck walking at a snail’s pace for a long time, which is bad, but its real use is to completely invalidate bosses.
The Loco Moves are funny, and useful, but they have a tendency to invalidate a lot of the game. They’re a bit too strong, and even though they’re limited by stocks, you can still get them easily. They’re never a resource you have to manage. Just press a button and wipe out an entire city block.
Style
The style is where the game shines and falters. Luckily, the good outweighs the bad, but the bad is still obvious. It’s like a fast food burger. It tastes good, but you can tell there’s something shady going on with the meat.
You’re encouraged to jump around. If you don’t, you won’t get any points, but more importantly, you’ll die. Jumping makes you harder to hit, gives you more accuracy while firing and gives you more time to shoot at someone uninterrupted. After the dive, you plop on the ground, but you recover quickly. You don’t slam the air out of your lungs like you do in Max Payne. It’s not a big commitment in Total Overdose.
You can also jump off walls. Dive next to a wall, and Cruz will run up it and flip, letting you shoot while in the air. This looks cool, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth. For starters, you need to be next to a wall to do it, and they can’t have anything like a low ceiling or an awning over them. If you try to run up them, you’ll knock your head on the way up and drop, losing rizz in the process. If it does work, it’s still not very useful. You barely jump off the wall, meaning you’re floating in mid-air next to it. Last, and certainly least, it locks your aim to a very narrow cone in front of you. If your target isn’t in that specific area, you can’t shoot them, even if you were locked on to someone before you started the jump.
The wall jump is a big, neon sign that highlights everything wrong with the style system, and other mechanics. It makes the auto-target look bad, since you can’t aim freely during the jump, and it ignores what you’re already locked on to. It’s a weird move, leaving you stuck in the air for a while after a contextual action, but there isn’t a way to smoothly transition into or out of it.
The lack of any way to go from one move to the next is the style system’s biggest flaw, along with the lack of moves as a secondary nitpick. You can’t boost off a wall and jump further, you’re stuck in the animation once it starts. You can’t naturally go into a wall run from a dive, you can’t dive over small walls that look like they could be hopped over.
There are melee weapons, but they don’t interact with the cool stunts at all. You can’t swing them while in mid-air, or do anything cool with them, you just hit people with them and they die.
Later on, Stranglehold would do something similar with a smoother movement system. You could run on railings, jump on chandeliers, roll on carts, do all sorts of crazy stuff. Sure, that game came out three years after Total Overdose, which doesn’t seem like much, but I think these little additions needed to be made. There were moments where I thought I could jump on something, or interact with the environment, and there wasn’t a way to do it. There could be more ways to get points, like sending an enemy flying with a grenade, then shooting them while they’re in the air.
I know I should judge a game on what it is, and not what it could be, but in the case of Total Overdose, what it could have been was obvious. It was right there! You can jump out of a moving car, blasting your guns like something out of an action movie, but you can’t do a simple drive-by. It’s stuff like that.
Scoring
The game rewards your kooky gringo madness with points. These points make you feel good when they go up, which is a reward by itself, but the game also gives you upgrades if you do well. There’s a global score, which is tracked throughout the game, rewarding you with small increments to your health, stamina and ammo capacity. The missions give you extra rewards if you hit their three score thresholds, which is ridiculously easy to do, and you gain extra health, lives and Loco Moves periodically if you’re getting a lot of points. This works fine, but this is where I put on my “shit nobody cares about enthusiast” shirt and explain to you why it could have been better.
Like I said a few paragraphs before, the game uses a score system that adds up your tricks, then multiplies them by the number of kills you chain together. Get a kill, and a timer starts ticking down. If it reaches zero, your combo ends and you cash out your points. If you get another kill, the timer resets. Simple, but easy to understand.
The problem I have with this is how easy it is to get the multiplier going. Every level throws dozens of armed goons at you, which is fun, but it also leaves you with multipliers of 20 and 30 after each room. This would be kind of okay, if the score requirements in each level weren’t so low. There isn’t a challenge mode, either. The score thresholds are the same across difficulties. This means you can get the gold medal score for a mission before the halfway point.
The game goes “Ay, muchacho! You truly are el gringo loco!”, and gives me some freebies, and all I did was throw a grenade into a car dealership full of drug mules.
The scoring system doesn’t ask much of the player. It doesn’t make you play the game optimally, or in risky ways. You just do what you were already doing, but maybe a little quicker to keep the combo going.
This is a personal nitpick, but the missions aren’t designed to keep a full chain going from start to end. If there’s a chaining system built around getting kills, I fully expect there to be a way to keep a combo going throughout the whole level. This is how chaining systems usually work, that’s how it is in Dodonpachi, Blue Revolver and- I can’t believe I’m praising the game- Gungrave GORE, as boring as the game is, its levels are designed around keeping your combo going, if you time things right. There isn’t a score bonus or recognition at the end if you do manage to full clear a stage, either.
To me, a good scoring system should push the player to play well. It should focus on the game’s core mechanics, and make you execute them perfectly. Total Overdose doesn’t do that. It has a rudimentary system that hints at something more under the hood, but there isn’t much there.
Open World
Total Overdose is an open world game. Technically. There is a city you can explore freely. You can steal cars like in GTA, drive around and jump off stuff. Shoot pedestrians, blow stuff up, all that good stuff.
Why is it technically an open world? Because there is a map you can move around in. It’s a world, and it’s open. It’s also completely empty. There’s nothing to do in it. This isn’t the typical Ubisoft checklist of icons. It’s a vast, open wasteland of cars and aimless pedestrians existing on sidewalks. It’s the mexican backrooms. Los cuartos traseros.
The only thing there is to do is collect floating point icons. They’re just there. You don’t even have to do anything cool to get them. They’re floating around, on rooftops, in alleys, in a dumpster. They look like leftovers from some Tony Hawk mission, but you don’t have a skateboard to glide across the city with. You’re stuck running around on your stubby little legs. You can’t do parkour, or any cool platforming. Despite this game’s aspirations of acrobatics, Cruz is still just a guy, and he can’t do much other than hop around, subject to gravity like the rest of us non-DEA agents.
You can find two kinds of mini games, where enemies start spawning and you have to kill them, but they’re both the same. The only difference is that one uses guns and the other forces you to use melee. Other than that they’re the same thing. You hit mindless zombie enemies for a few seconds and get some points.
There aren’t any other mini-games to do, no cool stuff to find, no shops to get new gear, no interesting NPC interactions, no jobs. There’s nothing. You can commit crimes and blow stuff up, but guess what? There aren’t even any cops to stop you! You can become an extinction-level event and you won’t even hear a siren. Where’s the fun of shooting an innocent taco stand with a rocket launcher if there isn’t anyone trying to kill you for it?
The game itself doesn’t have any faith in its own open world. You don’t have to drive around to find missions. Once a mission is unlocked, you can open the menu and select it, and the mission starts. Every level takes place in its own dedicated instance, only the side missions take place in the city itself. You can play the entire game without ever interacting with the open world aspect once. I like that part, at least. If I were forced to drive around the city and find my way around, I might have actually died of boredom. The whole thing could have been cut, and the game wouldn’t suffer for it.
Conclusion
Total Overdose is a game that does a lot with very little. It’s not too complex, and it has some areas that could be improved with a little effort, but it’s still solid. For all the whining and nitpicking I did, I still enjoyed my time with it. In fact, I have all those complaints because I like the game. I played it a lot, and saw the vision, and how it could have been taken from good to great.
Even if the trick system is a little lackluster, it’s still fun to mess around with. Running into a room full of bad guys, jumping across in slow-motion and blasting them all in the face is consistently entertaining.
It has to do with how the missions are designed. The game feels like an arcade game that had some unfortunate stuff tacked-on. Each mission is its own stage, with tightly packed rooms full of enemies coming at you from all directions. There’s always something to shoot at. Some missions can get a bit annoying, when they ask you to wander around to find poorly signposted objectives, but those are the exception. Most of them are short, high-impact bursts of carnage. Same with the side missions, which take only one or two minutes each. None of this driving to and from missions, or walkie-talky sections where you’re trying to keep pace with an NPC like in other open world games. You start the mission, shoot a couple dozen bad hombres, and get out, all while listening to what can only be described as “Mexican-American Nu metal”.
In short, I recommend Total Overdose. If you want something fun, simple and high-octane, give it a try. Especially if you don’t mind a little jank here and there. Sure, it could have been much, much better. If only there were a game that combined the stunts, style and madness of Max Payne, Stranglehold, Just Cause and Total Overdose, with a fleshed-out scoring system, it’d be perfect, but for what it’s worth, Total Overdose is still worth your time.
You can get Total Overdose on GOG For $6 USD. It goes on sale often, too.
Now if you’ll excuse me, all these Taco Bell Mucho Reflujo Quesapipas are doing a Spicy Move all over my esophagus. Until next time!