And earning the points these challenges provide unlock more powerups, more weapons, more Loco Moves and more Point Challenges. Confined spaces, lots of ammo and lots of drug dealers to kill. Bo-Ring.īut the Point Challenges on the other hand (usually assassination missions, fetch quests or driving missions) are great. Drive around, hit a load point, wait for the next section of the city to load, run over a pedestrian. Walking (or driving) around the city is a complete chore as there's nothing to do in this burg.
This is due to Total Overdose's major flaw as a sandbox game. In a pure stroke of genius, story missions and Point Challenges can be selected from the Pause Menu. Naturally, this leads to more missions for Ram and an eventual meeting with Papa Muerte.Īt the end of each of these missions Ram is dumped back into the city at large, Los Toros, and the next story mission and a bunch of side missions, known as Point Challenges open up to him. But Ram became a petty criminal who is broken out of jail to take Tommy's undercover place at a drug deal after an errant grenade breaks his leg. Tommy grew up to be a DEA agent like his pop. But he was betrayed by his partner and killed while Ram and his brother Tommy were just kids. You see, Ram's father was a DEA agent working to bring down Papa Muerte, the most evil drug overlord in all of Mexico. If nothing else, it keeps the action flowing at a good clip.Īll of this action funnels itself down through Total Overdose's plot of guns and drugs. Loco Moves are extremely useful and very plentiful, but it's hard to select the one you want in the heat of battle. By stringing together kill combos (blowing away banditos in quick succession) Ram earns special moves that range from Exploding Pinatas to Golden Guns (perfect head shots) to crazy Mexican wrestlers to an invincibility fueled double machinegun-guitar case attack called the El Mariachi. On the other side of the Shoot Dodge are Loco Moves. Best of all, the Shoot Dodge is powered by an Adrenaline Meter that refills very quickly so Ram is never without a new fix. During a Shoot Dodge "Ram" can jump directly into enemy fire and twist around the bullets Matrix-style and use a wide variety of weapons in his quest to take down a Mexican drug kingpin. Holding the L1 button during a firefight makes our hero, Ramiro Cruz, fly through the air pumping lead into anything that moves with the help of a very easy to use targeting circle. Total Overdose's Shoot Dodge brings that mechanic into the video game world in a big way.
GTA TOTAL OVERDOSE CODES MOVIE
John Woo made the double-barreled hero, flying through the air in slow motion, hitting every target in his sights an action movie archetype almost overnight. And that all comes down to the use of an old dog known as the Shoot Dodge. While it feels way too much like GTA, the whole game gives off a more action-packed vibe than GTA could ever dream of. Which is ironic considering that SCi, Eidos Interactive's parent company, has had a game based on Reservoir Dogs in the pipeline for years. Total Overdose is the game someone would make if they couldn't obtain the rights to make a game out of the films of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. But there's more going on here than meets the eye. So is it really a big surprise when a fresh handful of them were released during this GTA-less Christmas season ( what, is GTA Liberty City Stories chopped liver? - ed?)Īn alternate title for Total Overdose could be GTA: Mexico as the game's look and feel seem lifted wholesale from the great king of the gangster games. Thanks to GTA, "sandbox game" is this close to becoming its own genre. It's beyond pointless in this day to go on about all of the Grand Theft Auto clones that are currently choking store shelves.