Total Overdose Review

By Tom Bramwell Published 29 September, 2005

Viva los racisme casuales!

Version tested: PlayStation 2

Friend o' mine used to signal she'd eaten too much by saying, "I've got to go lie on my tummy." Cute. Eidos: go lie on your tummies. Total Overdose has definitely eaten too many games. It's got bits of all sorts. Mainly Grand Theft Auto, which it mimics with amusingly awful results, but also Prince of Persia (Let's rewind time!), Max Payne (Let's slow down time and jump around!), Tony Hawk (Let's get missions from blokes on street corners!), and even Bad Boys II (Look! Another room full of generic gun-toting foreigners! Let's be racist about them!).

That last bit is really quite silly. Apparently it's fine for the unsympathetic cocksure numbskull you play as to wander around Mexico saying things like, "Shut up and stop breathing chilli in my face," and "Hey! If you marry your sister, are you your own kid's uncle? I can't figure it out!" Hey! If you put things like that in your game, is it racist? I can't figure it out!

Having supped on too many games and chucked around lots of casual racism like it's funny, Total Overdose then pulls one of its wacky power-ups out of the bag - the one where you charge uncontrollably around headbutting people like a bull - and smashes its way through the nearest bargain bin in search of other PS2 staples like poorly detailed textures, identikit character models and lots of really transparent game mechanics. "You just picked up EXTRA POINTS. They will be added to your GLOBAL score. Increase your GLOBAL score to win BONUS AWARDS!"

It's a total mishmash of ideas, and they flood out of its pea-sized brain like it probably thinks the dirty foreigners flood over its precious borders. In the first 15 minutes I zip-lined, shot and then flew my dead father to his death, took over my twin brother and broke his leg, turned out to be the black sheep of the family and learned around 20 specific game mechanics one by one, and got to free-roam around US/Mexican border towns while being told about a billion different icons and points I could build up.

I should hate this really. It's all a bit wrong. Yet, bizarrely, I can't stop playing it. I will present the reason in the form of a geeky joke. Don't worry if you don't get it. Here goes. When is a ramp not a ramp? When the game logic doesn't say it is.

'Total Overdose' Screenshot behind

Summing up the game in a screenshot: He was probably behind them.

The reason Total Overdose kind of works on me is that it's so stupid that sometimes it's stupidly funny. Roam around the actually quite small and load-time-ridden areas of the game and you can uncover literally hours of amusement helping it to cock up in creative fashion. One of my favourite early adventures I've dubbed Car Juggle. You stand in the really GTA-esque road and wait for one of the really GTA-esque cars to stop, really GTA-esque, just in front of you. You then fire your gun, really GTA-esque (getting this bit yet? Good, I'll stop) into its bonnet and it suddenly goes to race off - directly at you. You will be struck and bounced about 10 feet ahead of it. It will continue to drive at you and with each collision you'll be tossed back up in the air. If you try you can keep juggling yourself for quite a while and - with a modicum of control over your trajectory and car logic that demands they veer onto any given side-road - there's a bit of a challenge to it. My record's now eight juggles, but you usually die around the fourth or fifth unless you've got upgraded health. If you stock up on the one-use Prince of Persia rewind power-ups you can just keep trying it.

The game's full of stupid things like this that make you laugh. You're supposed to have fun by finding (okay one more) really GTA-esque ramps and doing jumps off them, but - and here's where my ramp gag comes in - you can seemingly only do this on prescribed ramps, which aren't so much hidden as bloody everywhere. This isn't a proper physical 3D world like GTA's - if you race up to an angled surface you don't jump off it; you get stopped and your car shudders violently against the incline. Or maybe the back end gets bounced up in the air and you can grind along the wall with your arse inexplicably ten feet off the ground. Brilliant!

'Total Overdose' Screenshot barrels

Targeting barrels is really easy, and all the evil Mexicans stand next to them.

When you hit a proper ramp, you fly off it, it cuts to a third-person slow motion camera angle and you then fly through the air. I've seen that before SOMEWHERE. You can go up ramps at weird angles and find yourself propelled off them like it's a fast-moving conveyor belt; and when you land you can probably jam your car in the pavement so the camera shoots through a nearby wall; and you can hit the lamp-posts, but watch out for the yellow ones which are indestructible. It's like Grand Theft Auto designed by the guys who did SOLDNER.

When you're done laughing at the bugs... Actually, I'm not done laughing at them yet. You see hats and heads suspended in the air; you can shoot a guy who's sitting in the cab of a truck until he dies, then for some reason his chest lurches forward like he's had a nasty turn with a xenomorph and he shakes his way violently through the shattered windscreen; the oft-gun-toting general populace flee your campaign of violence by running into walls, falling over, lying there a bit, getting up, leaning casually against the wall, then falling over again, etc. That's if they're not too busy leaping in front of your car and getting knocked miles into the air like bowling pins.

But when you're done laughing at all of that, and it takes a while, you've got the things that game actually intended to play around with, and some of them are genuinely fun and amusing. The running-up-walls and leaping-around-in-slow-mo stuff is okay, but being able to headshot someone and then run under his sombrero as it flutters to the ground and claim it for your own is actually amusing; the random (sigh) really GTA-esque side missions that involve killing men dressed as zombies or wrestlers are passable; the power-ups that give you twin guitar case machineguns are nuts; and the constant points-gathering is actually mildly addictive. On top of that, you can do the story missions. You'll have to suffer the characters, but you'll get to blow lots of things up. Lots of things. And you'll get to shoot people in creative fashion.

'Total Overdose' Screenshot burrito

SHOOTDOGE + HAVOC + KILL. It should say that on the box.

It's not particularly funny by design ("You sound like my old girlfriend..." ... YEAH! That showed HIM!), but you get to laugh at it and in spite of it often enough for it to be fun, and its unpredictability is practically arresting. Shockingly, it even does a couple of things that the GTA chaps could learn from instead of suing over - the time-rewind feature, regular save points during story missions, and ability to load missions directly from the pause menu, are good things, as is the ability to pick up guns, health packs and the like just by running over them. You also strafe by default instead of squirreling like Carl Johnson, and you auto-target properly. That works.

See, Total Overdose is unmistakably game, largely thanks to running around a press release archive with its mouth wide open, and won't exactly win any design awards (although, saying that, Big Mutha Truckers did so who bloody knows), and we probably shouldn't encourage them by buying it, but if you happened to be sitting at home one evening, bored off your tits, and feel like lying on your tummy with a stupid grin splattered across your face, you could probably do worse than to rent it out - even if it is basically that "Kill all the Haitians" line from Vice City done up as an entire game. Totally.

6 / 10

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Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (42) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • bionutz #1 6 years ago

    6/10 no wonder. who's paying to have these games developed? are they asking gamers?

  • Talha #2 6 years ago

    Thank Almighty I almost bought this!!!

  • Wobble #3 6 years ago

    I finished this last night and enjoyed every minute of it.

    The engine is no where near the technology or polish of the recent GTA's, but it's not really about that, it's about the combat, which is SO much better than Rockstar's attempts.

    Once you get the hang of how to get different kill types (i.e. don't just shootdodge + fire at random people) then the missions are all about working out the best way through them to keep the kill combo going.
    You need to mix it up with spins/headshots/pointblank/multiple kills in the air/wall moves/weapon changes while in the air etc.
    It's short enough to not get totally repetitive, especially if you mix up story missions and challenges and there is a TON of hidden stuff to search the city for. There is also character progression through the dual wield/unlimited ammo collection scheme, it's just a shame the cash bonuses stop at 500k. I was up to 900k when I uninstalled it last night. (finished story and all challenges and scoured the city for _most_ hidden stuff) I was on the cusp of boredom just as i finished all of the scripted stuff, so IMHO it was more or less the perfect length.

    It is essentially a fun game, that has a pickup and play learning curve with as much depth as you can be bothered with and occasionally a bit of humour.

    I think 6/10 is too harsh, I'd argue for a 7. (also it's only 18 quid!)

  • Madder-Max #4 6 years ago

    heh! San Andreas is the DADDY. Who's yer daddy Total-overdose-bitch? San Andreas is...of course....

    Thass right TO....you get back to being the lil dog that gets walked by GTA....sorry....got carried away...

  • #5 6 years ago

    funny you should mention racism and GTA in the same review, GTA's casual racism is obviously influencing copycat games to do the same.

  • Aretak #6 6 years ago

    Has anybody seen the ads on TV for this? Shameless rip-offs of GTA, complete with those trademark boxes on a black background.

  • absolutezero #7 6 years ago

    It reminded me of PN03 in that its all about the points.

    Its a fun distraction much like Burnout and Timesplitters but in a different mold, I presonally had alot more fun with the game that San Andreas, so on that front it did what it set out to do, be a fun game.

  • Huntcjna #8 6 years ago

    Im gonna pick it up when it gets to a tenner sometimes I need this kind of game to offset my story heavy/ tactics ridden back catalogue

  • El_MUERkO #9 6 years ago

    played a bit of the PC version, it is entertaining for a while

  • Wobble #10 6 years ago

    The 'racism' is:
    a) incredibly tongue in cheek
    b) Taking the piss out of Mexico. I hate to break this to you, but being Mexican is not a race, it's a nationality.

    The game has a few bugs, none even remotely game breaking, most as stated in the article are amusing, amusing enough to make you go out of your way to try to reproduce them. But above all, it's just damn good fun, It's the second game I have actually completed in about the last 3 years, the only other was HL2, and I took a months break in the middle of that because it got boring.
    I don't mean to keep rambling on in this fan-boyish manner, but that review was way too harsh and it will obviously stop a lot of people from playing this enjoyable game... so I'm just trying to give an alternative view.

    Oh and btw, if you have the choice, get it on PC, it's a tenner less and the mouse keyboard will be a LOT better to control it than a Joypad could be, to get decent points you need to do lots of fast spins, the mouse perfectly suits that.
    Edited by 2 at 29/09/05 @ 13:31

  • absolutezero #11 6 years ago

    Hear hear! Racism is bandied about so much these for the smallest thing that most people loose sight of what it actually means, have we become so po-faced and Americanised that we can't laugh at slightly risque tongue-in-cheek bad-taste jokes?

    Bill Hicks cries. If he could.

  • RabidMonkey #12 6 years ago

    "Thank Almighty I almost bought this!!!"

    A six is by no means a bad score.

  • Stickman #13 6 years ago

    Sounds like fun to rent for a weekend.

  • Eldritch #14 6 years ago

    It's shit. Check out the demo. And, yes, it IS racist, which strikes me as a bit odd, because it's from a Danish team.

  • tengu #15 6 years ago

    Bill Hicks is dead.

  • PearOfAnguish #16 6 years ago

    "Bill Hicks is dead."

    Indeed. Have you only just realised?

  • Royal Fool #17 6 years ago

    Well, according to a press release on the developer's site, Take Two already signed a deal with them for an original game franchise... doesn't sound like they were offended by the similarities between TO and GTA.

  • deadlock #18 6 years ago

    Yeah, but 'nationalism' means something else. It may not, technically, be 'racism' but negative prejudice towards another nationality is generally referred to as racism.

  • tengu #19 6 years ago

    "Indeed. Have you only just realised?"

    Realised what?

  • Stickman #20 6 years ago

    I though nationalism, was being racist FOR the country, not against it. What's jingoism?

  • PES_Fanboy #21 6 years ago

    Actually, as all of us (well, apart from the PC gamers - just kidding fellas, don't waste your 1337 mouse-strafing hand punching me) are of the same *race* - the human race, therefore I think we're actually debating ethnicity and / or nationality discrimination.

    There's only two things I hate - small-minded discrimination, and the bloody Dutch.

  • Scientist #22 6 years ago

    Does Wobble work for Eidos or something?

  • w00t #23 6 years ago

    Quite liked the demo - it was... fun. Not too hard, not intellectually taxing, just fun.

  • RabidMonkey #24 6 years ago

    Are any video games "intellectually taxing" nowadays?

  • KennyTheEskimo #25 6 years ago

    I totally agree with the review - if it had been a GTA rip off. If you want GTA and want to rate the game as GTA then Total Overdose doesn't even reach to the scrotum of that game.

    But...

    This game is not GTA. Nor does it try to be. This game is a shooter first and foremost. Secondly it's even more of a shooter. It's never intended to be a free-roaming do everything you want kind of game. If you judge it on those merits then this game is by far one of the best around. Just because a game has cars you can jack does it mean you have to be compared to GTA?

    It's also sad that people feel offended by the obnoxious main character and his comments. But that's the whole point. This guy is so dumb, goofy and repulsive that you are not supposed to like him. He is supposed to make you laugh with all his no brain comments. And I guess it did if I read the review right.

    This game is refreshingly fun, dumb and so not taking itself serious that it was always a gamble if people "would get it" or not.

    Not being bitter, but just trying to stand up for the game a little.

  • Eldritch #26 6 years ago

    It's always great to have PS2-grade textures on your PC. That's what made Area 51 such an eye pleaser.

  • Tyronne #27 6 years ago

    for the 18 quid I paid for this from Play,its money well spent as if anything its the one thing games should be above all else, and thats fun to play which this is.

  • w00t #28 6 years ago

    @Rabid

    Depends on how drunk I am at the time... ;)

  • Eldritch #29 6 years ago

    Good to know that there still people willing to cough up 18 quid for sub-par exploiters. I'm sure the people at Eidos will appreciate every single penny (might be too late though).

  • jellyhead #30 6 years ago

    yup, at £18 i've been having loads of fun with this game.
    It does get a bit repetitive but i play it in 2 hours bursts anyway so it's fine for me.
    Forget GTA think more Urban Chaos meets Max Payne but the gunplay vastly improved.
    As i've said elsewhere and the review states it's not the best but you'll have a big cheesy grin on your face while playing it.

  • Chtulie #31 6 years ago

    @Wobble:
    So it has more in common with Viewtiful Joe?

  • RabidMonkey #32 6 years ago

    Urban Chaos? Now there's a game you don't hear mentioned often.

  • The_Real_Olla #33 6 years ago

    6/10 is harsh ... I enjoyed the PC demo and went out and brought it for the XBox... Sure, the graphics are not going to win a price, but the game itself is great fun and the soundtrack is very nice... This game does not take itself too serious, which I really like about it.. A charming title if you ask me.. Recommended!

  • Wobble #34 6 years ago

    seems total overdose is a bit like marmite eh?

    /hates marmite.

    hmm, I think it must be the anti-marmite, cause I like it :)

    @Chtulie: Don't know, I never really like the looks of VJ, so i've never played it :(

  • symmetry #35 6 years ago

    I don't know about the game but the review sure had me laughing.

  • Salvia #36 6 years ago

    This game is definitely a case of 'GTA is selling millions!Quick, find a game that's a bit like it and sign it!'.

  • Markusdragon #37 6 years ago

    Anything like Mercenaries?

  • Royal Fool #38 6 years ago

    Wow, thanks for reminding me of Urban Chaos. That was a fun game.

  • morriss #39 6 years ago

    do reviewers on here actually have journo degres? Some of the most sterile, formulaic prose I've come across. Stopped reading half-way through...EURGH!
    Edited by 1 at 29/09/05 @ 19:51

  • Eldritch #40 6 years ago

    Do you have a spell checker?

  • ED209 #41 6 years ago

    Urban Chaos had leaves, GTA didn't (it had newspapers). What do I win?

  • Wobble #42 6 years ago

    i was reading your second post, but i got bored because i thought repetition was going to set in =)

  • Baronen #43 6 years ago

    Funny, from reading the review it doesn't seem like an "above average"-game... Oh well.