El Matador is a Third Person shooter set in Colombia and centered around taking down a powerful cartel know as La Valedora. You play as a DEA special agent called Victor who quickly earns the nickname “El Matador” due to his effectiveness and ruthlessness on the field. Victor is more of an executioner than anything and will make no attempts to arrest anyone or secure any drugs. Pretty much all you will be doing throughout the game is killing from start to end. There are hardly any moments when your life is not at risk but without a decent storyline that may get old fast for some people. Countless hordes of goons will try to take you down and luckily they are fairly fun to fight. What separates Vincent from his peers is that he used to love the movie ‘The Matrix’ in high school and has somehow gained the power to dramatically leap through the air in slow motion. It is a useful move for a quick retreat when you are surrounded though there is a limit to how many times you can use it.
Your ability to slow time will deplete as you use it and depletes even further if you kill a enemy during it’s effect. Killing an enemy normally refills your slow-mo bar shown at the top of the screen. You will be able to toggle slow-mo on and off at will, whether you are standing or crouching and it lasts a long time. I have never had it run out and this ability can easily turn the game into a cakewalk if overused. Without it the game would be quite challenging as enemies are surprisingly good at finding cover and are excellent shots. To add to that, Victor is no superhero, he may have the ability to slow time but he is quite fragile. Taking gunfire will quickly burn through your health and while this game does have regenerating health, you can not rely on it. You gain about one hit-point out of 100 every 30 seconds so you will be there a long time if you want to be healed. Health kits are your only real option to patch yourself up and they can be found in many places like hanging on walls, resting on desks or by opening random cabinets.
Armor can also be found and greatly increases the amount of damage you can take before biting the dirt. These are much rarer than health kits and will not affect your movement in anyway. You will frequently be accompanied by heavily equipped police officers, that also appear to wear body armor but in reality they are all appearance. They are pretty much near useless and will die if an enemy so much as sneezes in their direction. I say nearly useless, since it does help to reveal where the enemy is when they get shot and they do drop some valuable rifle ammo when killed. So your allies are walking piggy banks for the most part. Your enemies on the other hand are highly skilled and hyper alert to everything around them. It will be impossible to go unnoticed and you will be gunned down quickly if you are out in the open. There is no cover system in the game, though you will definitely still want to find some cover via crouching. I quite liked the need for cover, it kept the game from feeling like a pure action game and added some tension as you pop out of cover, while diving near your enemies in slow motion, guns blazing glory.
Speaking of guns there are quite a few of them in the game and you will be able to carry all of them at once. You can’t carry much ammo and many of them share the same ammo type, so it does force you to be careful with your shots. Annoyingly enough after every mission, they will take all your guns away and will send you back in with nothing but basic gear, making you scavenge more ammo and gear all over again. It makes sense that the police force wouldn’t allow you to keep random weapons you got from a raid, but in a game where you are pretty much a space wizard, it just feels like pointless busy work. Most guns are too inaccurate and under-powered to be useful in any sense, so you will want to mainly stick to rifles or even a pistol over your shotgun. In enemy hands they are pinpoint accurate, frustratingly enough. Dual wielding is pretty pointless due to inaccuracy and low ammo supply. Some weapons have alternate firing modes like being able to set it to full auto or single shots, which is a cool feature that allows more options to take down your foes. Bullets even ricochet off of some surfaces and are still capable of killing either you or your enemies. That feature isn’t used much but it was a neat gimmick.
Glass also has a neat physics systems that allow them to break part by part in gunfights and it just looks awesome to see the aftermath of a battle in a setting full of glass. Your typical explosive barrels are also present but they take way too long to go off and will give your enemy plenty of time to kill you. Simply shooting him is far less trouble. Enemies dress in casual clothes most of the time and all fight pretty much the same way regardless of the weapon they have. An enemy with a shotgun will fire at you from a very far distance while a enemy with a pistol will try to rush you, it can be odd at times but nothing major. Bosses are the exact same as normal enemies and have no different patterns, the only difference being they have much more health and never feel satisfying to fight. They usually appear in the end of a mission and have no sense of importance. The missions end really abruptly, you will kill a boss and that very second you will be teleported somewhere else with no idea as to what just happened. They have no sense of flow and you will be at a loss as to what you are doing now and why. It has no sense of progression or upping the ante, the first mission felt the exact same as the last but in a different environment.
The story is so bad that it would have been better if they didn’t even try. There are multiple other characters in the police force, but having just finished the game, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you the name of any character other than your own or anything about them. They are just there for the sake of it and add absolutely nothing to the plot or the events. I don’t even know what I accomplished throughout the game. The ending was the worst I have ever seen, in any form of media, to top it off. El Matador would have benefited from just being a bunch of levels with no story, honestly. All it served to do was confuse the player, conveniently take away your weapons every mission and break up the action for some pointless banter. To make matters worse the voice acting is horrible and the Hispanic accents they were going for, are terrible as well. It could have been used to their advantage if they had made this into a cheesy, tongue in cheek kind of game, but nope, this game is dead serious in it’s “narrative”. Environments themselves haven’t aged too badly and it does inject quite a bit of color at times, which is a nice change of pace from the missions were you are in typical warehouses or sewers.
Now here is the thing that will likely annoy or even ruin the game for some players. The shadows in this game are glitched out and randomly flick around, which not only look weird but will catch your eye due to it’s movement and waste your valuable time in a dangerous gunfight. Another thing is the game only uses one CPU core for some reason, so if you are experiencing heavy slow down, just open the task manager, set all cores to on and it should now run smoothly. Moving on from the tech side of things, the music is decent but gets old fast. It has this nice techno beat and it makes sense in the first mission which is set in a club house, but that small loop of music plays throughout the whole game. Never have I been so fed up with the music of a game other than when I played The Slaughtering Grounds. Even after the bashing I gave the game in the last few paragraphs, there is no denying I had fun playing it. If it had lasted anymore than four hours it definitely would have outstayed it’s welcome, but as it is, it is a decent little time waster. There is nothing to do after the campaign so it will be a very short game to get through. Go in with your expectations low and you will likely be surprised how fun it manages to be regardless of all it’s flaws. I’m not saying that you should go out and buy it, though if you already have it in your library it may be a good choice when you want dumb mindless fun.
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