Total Overdose - A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico

The best argument for Total Overdose is a single move: leap sideways, slow the world to a crawl, and fire a pistol in each hand at two different men while a third gets a wall-run kick to the face. The game was built around that pose. Everything else exists to keep you reaching for it.

Deadline Games, a Danish studio, clearly had Robert Rodriguez's Mexico-border action films in mind, and the debt shows in the tone. You play Ramiro Cruz, who goes undercover in the drug trade to find out who killed his father, a DEA agent. The plot is pulp and doesn't pretend otherwise. The city is a loud, sunlit collage of markets, wrestling arenas and dusty back roads, and the game leans hard on its Mexican setting for music, color and humor.

The structure borrows from the Grand Theft Auto school: a hub city, missions you pick up, and a lot of freedom between them. But the shooting is where it parts ways. Style is rewarded directly. Chaining kills with acrobatic moves fills a meter and unlocks upgrades, so playing flashy is also playing efficiently. There are also challenge-style side activities, such as racing, which add variety and keep the pacing from sagging.

It shows its age. The camera can fight you in tight spaces, the lock-on is generous but sometimes picks the wrong target, and enemy variety wears thin before the story finishes. The technical edges are rough in the way many ambitious sixth-generation games were. It was also an obvious budget-minded cousin of bigger open-world releases, and it never pretended to match their scale.

What survives is attitude. Few games of the period were willing to be this openly absurd about being a power fantasy, and fewer still tied the absurdity so cleanly to a movement system that feels good in the hand. It is a flawed game with a clear idea of what it wants to be, and that idea still plays better than many tidier shooters from the same shelf.