Made Man: Confessions of the Family Blood review (PlayStation 2)

Of course, when enemies travel in the kind of numbers that they do in Made Man, and have the innate ability to hone in on the teensiest part of your exposed body and shoot it to death very, very quickly, it really doesn't make much difference if you're a dunce or a Rhodes scholar. Most of the game's missions just revolve around getting from point A to point B while killing everyone in between, and often there's quite a bit to kill. So many bullets and such clunky aiming and shooting mechanics conspire to make the gameplay little more than a constant frustration. The game tries to throw a few curveballs in with a "kill rush" feature that slows down time temporarily and leads to you getting shot slightly less frequently, and a "retort kill," where some not-quite-dead enemy says something insulting to you, and then you stand over them and execute them while uttering some painful quip back to them (doing this refills your health gauge, for some reason). Not only do the execution moves look lame (and sometimes broken, as Joey won't even be facing the guy he's killing), but they don't pop up often enough to be all that useful.

Couple the infuriating shooting sequences with some abysmal stealth bits, and you pretty much get a game that's no fun to play at all. That the game isn't longer than six or seven hours is almost merciful, though in real time, it'll take you a lot longer than that to get through it, as you'll find yourself replaying dozens of sequences again and again and again. Perhaps if the game had a better checkpoint system or any sort of autosave functionality, that might not be such an issue, but that's not the case. You'll also want to be diligent about saving on your own, as the game does occasionally lock up and force you to reboot. Or, you know, you could just not play it. That'd probably be better for all involved.

Even more horrific than the gameplay is the presentation. At times, Made Man looks like a game made for the original PlayStation, and even when it manages to claw its way up to something that looks marginally PlayStation 2-esque, it still lines the bottom of the barrel with its hideous-looking textures, atrocious animations, and zombielike character models. Even with all these low-rent visual components, the frame rate still chops to death during particularly hefty bouts of gunfire. The audio is even worse, mostly because of the editing. Joey's voice acting, in-game sound effects, and the licensed soundtrack (yes, they actually went and got licensed songs for this pile of junk, including stuff from artists like UNKLE, Bachman Turner Overdrive, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas) are all pretty solid, but the audio mix is so wildly inconsistent and periodically busted that it's impossible to enjoy any of it. Cutscene audio is much, much quieter than in-game audio, leading to a lot of volume adjustment throughout the game. Sometimes dialogue starts skipping loudly, and any time voice over narration pops up in-game, the music just cuts out altogether.

If you painstakingly dig through Made Man's seemingly endless onslaught of poor design decisions and ugly problems, you might be able to spot a few things that come across as legitimately interesting or entertaining. But it's just not worth sifting through so much garbage to get to a few fleeting moments of fun, especially when dozens upon dozens of PS2 games do this formula loads better than Made Man does. Made Man was all set to be canceled once, and it should have stayed that way. Don't play this game.