Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

When his publisher, MarathonSoft, is taken over by a mysterious chap who's apparently a huge hardcore gamer, Matt is offered a chance to resurrect his career - but soon finds himself trapped in the new, next-generation game he's meant to be starring in, with his only link to the real world being "QA", a tester at MarathonSoft who speaks to him from outside the gameworld. Obviously, his only way out is to actually beat the game.

The structure is, essentially, an excuse for the developers to break the fourth wall on a regular basis - with Matt directly commenting in "gamer" terms on what's happening around him - and to plunder videogames' history for references, in-jokes and characters. For instance, the weapons we saw in action were fairly standard fare, but we're promised a whole host of weapons and power-ups that will be familiar nods to famous weapons from other games.

Bosses, too, will often be nods to other games. The developers hinted strongly that one of the bosses will be a familiar-looking JRPG character with a huge sword and long hair - while another will be an Italian "carpenter" with an impressive moustache. Right.

More than just gags, however, the setting also lets the team play with how the world around you is structured. One of the key concepts is that an outside force is "hacking" the gameworld as you play - so entire sections of levels change on the fly, and enemies from Matt's old games are warped into the most incongruous locations to face him.

In one example which we saw, the grubby back yard of a nightclub morphed into a Wild West high noon showdown in front of Matt's eyes. That was fairly impressive - we're less sure about the game using this "hacking" as an excuse to pop enemies into the world all around you. At least Doom III had the decency to wait until your back was turned before making ten demons leap out of a wardrobe.

Graphically, the whole affair isn't looking much more than competent at the moment. There are some quite nice touches - destroyed cover which disappears in a shower of digital effects, for example, or "code" flying off enemies as you shoot them, rather than blood. However, the engine itself is an in-house developed technology, D3 claims - and it does show. Eat Lead is disappointingly bland-looking at present. While it may improve markedly in the next six months, if it doesn't it'll join Haze and several others in the growing pile of games marked "why didn't you just license Unreal?"