Warehouses, ridiculous & camp bad guys, repeating enemies & bosses, level ‘X’ wizards, recharging health & many more besides. All videogame clichés, expected to be in games to ruin your fun & create tedium. How amusing would it be to have a game that actually took the ‘Michael’ out of these features rather than using them in a deadly serious way?

Well that’s what Eat Lead tries - & fails - to do. Maybe that’s not fair actually. To start with & on paper it’s a sound idea. Even at the start it works quite well. There were a few moments that raised a smile & even a chuckle through the first level.

Unfortunately that’s about it, the first level or so works. But it all too quickly descends into nonsense & is no longer funny as Eat Lead becomes the gaming cliché. It re-uses gags & it even stops trying to parody games at all & ends up just becoming quite boring. Where it seems to forget it was making fun of other games & ends up a serious(ish) game itself. It’s a shame as it’s an interesting premise that id like to see executed properly with plenty of scope for loads of variety & in-jokes for gamers.

Instead you get sent through countless warehouses & the odd kitchen, fighting identikit bad guys, spouting generic one liners & doing nothing more than just killing everything on your way from a-b.

So we know the USP of the game doesn’t actually work out & in an attempt to make a joke out of generic gaming features ends up being the joke. But what of the actual gameplay?

Don’t expect much here either unfortunately because its generic, just as you’d expect. It uses the –now compulsory 3rd person shooter feature – Gears cover system. Luckily it actually works rather well. Its easy enough to get into cover, & popping out to shoot someone’s face off is just as satisfying to do as you’d expect. But it lacks the fluid movement & responsive controls of the game its mimicking. It can actually feel quite cumbersome & slow with poor animation & the odd frustrating moments where he doesn’t seem to respond to button presses. But it does the job & the game remains playable throughout.

That’s all there is to it really. The entire game is just quite mediocre. It doesn’t do anything particularly bad or wrong & the shooting mechanics work well with it rarely feeling frustrating. The gameplay never moves away from getting from point to point through boring scenery & shooting everything that gets in the way. It has the odd nice idea sure, like a point later in the game where you fight the games creators in a multiplayer style deathmatch. But these are quite rare & when introduced get used so often that it becomes boring. The game just never raises itself above average. A shame.