GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 02/27/2007
- Released on: 02/27/2007
- Originally published on GameSpot: Chili Con Carnage (PSP) Review
The PlayStation Portable has been suffering through a long bout of PlayStation 2 hand-me-down syndrome ever since the system's release. In that time, dozens of PS2 games (some of them years old) have been ported, remixed, or otherwise crammed onto UMDs and rereleased as PSP games, usually with some lame subtitle to try to make the game seem different. But as annoying as this syndrome has been up to this point, occasionally some games are exempt. Such is the case with Chili Con Carnage, a reworking of a little-known action game from 2005 called Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico. It was basically a Robert Rodriguez movie and Max Payne all rolled up into one, and it was a patently silly piece of work, emphasizing ridiculous shoot-dodging moves and big explosions over...well, just about everything else. In Chili Con Carnage, developer Deadline Games has made the experience much better by stripping away some of the more superfluous elements of the console game (such as the open-ended, GTA-esque city) and turning in an even more ridiculous adventure.
Chili Con Carnage's main story follows Ramiro (or Ram), who goes to visit his government-agent father at work one day to bring him a birthday present--a box full of kittens. The father and son commiserate for a moment as the father opens his gifts. But not two seconds after the father utters the word "kittens!" does a gigantic thrasher come crashing into his office, with a cackling villain behind the wheel, giggling with glee as Ram's father (and those poor, poor kittens) are horribly murdered. And that's not even the most ridiculous thing to happen in the game. As Ram goes on a revenge hunt to kill those responsible for his father's death, Ram finds himself mixed up with several wacky Mexican crime lords, from a bull-charging behemoth to a drug lord with his own jet fighter.
Some of this premise might sound familiar to those who played Total Overdose, but the vast bulk of the story has been totally redone. Chili Con Carnage reuses some of the core level designs and characters from the original game, but the story takes wildly different turns. The developer essentially scraped off whatever hard-boiled or minutely serious elements the original game had in favor of making the whole thing a totally bonkers affair. And that really works to the game's benefit, too. Chili Con Carnage is legitimately funny in a number of spots, and even when it's not funny "ha-ha," it's still goofy enough to enjoy just because of how over the top everything is.
A lot of the humor is in the action. Total Overdose revolved its action almost exclusively on the act of Ram being able to leap around like a bandito inside the Matrix while shooting copious amounts of exploding barrels and boilerplate thugs. In Chili Con Carnage, the number of explodable objects has become even more copious, and the thugs have been given more personality, making them all the more fun to waste. You also get a myriad of weird power-ups that do everything from providing you a pair of machine-gunning guitar cases that instantly destroy anyone in their path to creating a giant Mexican wrestler to bully any nearby enemies. What ties all this carnage together is a Tony Hawk-esque combo system that racks up points based on how many kills you can string together, as well as how crazily your kills play out. An onscreen meter drops when you aren't in the process of wrecking shop, so the goal is to try to keep the crazy going as long as possible. In fact, you could theoretically keep the combo meter going for the entire length of a level, if you were talented enough.
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