Max Shame
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and this is something we see a lot in video games. Someone does something really cool and others want to do their spin upon the formula. When it comes to the full dichotomy of third person shooters, there are a select few that completely flipped the genre on its lid upon arrival, and one title that spawned hundreds of shooters with its additions to the gaming world was 2001’s Max Payne. With its utilization of Bullet Time mechanics and achievements in low-pitched, grungy noir storytelling, it was a title that put Remedy Entertainment on the map and another studio, Rockstar Games, even higher in the clouds.
While the gaming world is now 12 years removed from the Max Payne franchise, love-letter imitators have circled the empty wagon in search of inspiration. The newest title to greet the flock is Strange Scaffold’s El Paso, Elsewhere. Instead of in the gritty streets of New York we start our story in the flat, desolate desert side of rural El Paso, Texas. You play as James Savage, a vampire hunter with a affinity for painkillers right in line with your resident undercover cop, as we join him on the crescendo of his journey to locate a vampire named Draculae and stop her before she ends the world. Draculae is also James’ ex-girlfriend. You can see how this could be complicated for James.
El Paso provides a small tutorial to get the feel for the descending floors of violence ahead of you but if you’ve played Max Payne you’re already ahead of the curve. Fluid movements allow run n’ gun gameplay, and you’ll have a bar dedicated to how long you can slow time which allows for precise aiming in hectic situations. You’re equipped with a dodge roll that has a pretty generous amount of invincibility and a dive which is farther than a dodge roll but not necessarily as efficient. There is a jump button to help with scaling furniture and some light platforming but it’s mostly used for specific obstacles in the game as opposed to something you’ll use often.
James carries a litany of weaponry that’ll be used to stop the hordes in front of you. Pistols, Uzis, Tommy Guns, Shotguns, Explosives; the arsenal is brought out for James and it’s well stocked. Stakes are used as James’ melee option but they are limited, and refilled by breaking wooden structures and props. As an aside, it’s an odd design choice having to ram your face into every wooden structure to be properly equipped for battle.
Guns lack a particular punch in visuals and sound, with the exception of the Shotgun which absolutely deletes enemies and was my main weapon throughout the game. There’s something barbarically enjoyable about a close range shotgun blast morphing an enemy into a wall with a loud shrill of buckshot and a Dragonball Z-like instant teleportation of their ragdoll into another area. Hilarity ensues far longer than it probably was intended.
The vampiric army James has to mow down consists of your usual suspects: mummies, werewolves, priestesses, puppet makers, biblically accurate angels (no, really). Enemies hit hard and quickly so maintaining distance is vital to survival. Distance though, is very easy to obtain as most of the enemies are not smart and very easily exploitable. Mummies will walk in a straight line to you so it’s easy to corral them into a hallway and casually dispose of them. Werewolves will always provide an audio cue before jumping which is an easy tell to remove them with a shotgun blast (very satisfying to hit in the air regardless), and the angels fly high enough in the air you can pick them off from several rooms away since most of the levels do not have ceilings.
Enemies consistently sway from overly easy to sigh-inducing hard due to two scenarios: size of crowd and choice of position. For tracking, I played on the defaulted Intended difficulty, but you can use sliders to choose the correct difficulty on damage done, damage taken, infinite ammo, etc. It’s a very nice touch that caters to fine-tuning the correct amount of sweat you feel during battles. When dealing with a normal pack of enemies the writing is on the wall on how to handle each one, but slamming a large amount in a small room is less a competently hard battles and more a trial-and-error on what to do when they all spawn. No room in El Paso is hard per se, but instead is startling because when 8 enemies pop on screen with a jump on how to kill you that’s not prepping a smartly positioned battle, that’s prepping for the inevitable second try with extra information.
This happens when the design does not meet the demands. In Max Payne, the Bullet Time and acrobatic dives work because you knew what enemies would do and that they would punish you for not making use of all the tools provided. You had to use those moves because if you walked into a room and just started shooting, you’d get plugged with bullets and die immediately. El Paso suffers from the opposite of this. Constantly throughout my 9 hours I succumbed to checking corners and shooting warning shots into rooms to proc enemies because I was tired of losing health by playing the game as apparently intended. Enemies hide directly behind closed doors and breakable areas, forcing damage taken and in some later levels an instant death. Random rooms will spawn cannon-fodder alongside y-axis-abusing priestesses (who kill in 2 hits) and angels (who kill in 1 hit) that will send you to a checkpoint from way off-screen with no tells. You want to go guns blazing, and the game wants you to go guns blazing, but you’re instead penalized for doing so by dying repeatedly because a majority of the enemies hit like trains and doing the cool stuff gets you killed.
El Paso forces a sense of passivity that makes the game drag its feet across a staggering fifty levels, which feels about as passive as the gameplay. Most areas are bland room-to-room setups that offer very simple puzzle-elements that are required to move on to the next area. Hostages are strewn about each level for you to save or kill, which is never explained or justified beyond a moral objective for the game’s two endings. Sometimes colored hearts are needed to open doors? The whole concept of floor-to-floor progression felt very disjointed and played more like plot filler to give James a reason to descend, descend, descend.
And I’m sorry, but I cannot let this soundtrack go. Some levels are backed with rap songs tuned to spoken-word by James himself in an attempt to infuse the music provided with the internal mental struggle and violent tendencies instilled throughout his journey and it just does not hit. It’s jarring trying to play the game and hearing these songs come on as it’s hard to aim when you’re laughing so hard at the game instead of the songs providing the fuel to continue forward. (Human Sundae is a sin against God and Hip Hop – Demetri)
That said, what does shine brightly throughout El Paso was the writing and the cinematography splashed throughout the game’s cutscenes. You can really feel the writer’s room working extra hard to depict a desperate man hopped on pills and going weeks without sleep trudging through each floor with a molasses-slopped interlude piecing together a puzzle he does not want to finish, but must. I would love to kick back and watch a show built around this style of writing and camera work, so it’s a shame the narrative is surrounded by what the game eventually became. The financial troubles that came with El Paso’s development have been publicly documented, as well as how resisting unhealthy work environments for developing video games played a hand in creating a rift between expected investor-backed dream and confirmed reality. But when the journey leads to a game like what El Paso, Elsewhere eventually became, it results in a difficult pill to swallow.
Reviews as Fair as a Die Roll 