El Matador

El Matador is Max Payne but in South America...wait, i mean Colombia. As far as "budget barrel" games (a term i use affectionally sometimes) El matador is a pretty good one. You play as some DEA guy sent into takedown a bunch of bad guys in, I think, Medellin spanning about 3-4 hours. I think the length does El Matador a favor, it's a heap of fun, ragdoll infused, slow mo third person action with enough polish that it just works. The biggest issue i had with El Matador besides the occasional difficulty spikes was how, I think, it only used one core of your CPU, making it run very poorly on modern OS'. I'm hoping GOG's release fixes this. A solution has been provided on the PC gaming wiki if its still running at a low framerate. Overall, this might be a the quintensial 6/10 or 7/10 game, it's a pretty good time if you've already played Max Payne 1 & 2 for the 10th time and want something a bit similar

This is an oddity, but a welcome one! I remember seeing this advertised but never being able to find it. A I'm a huge fan of Max Payne, and this is that only without shoot dodging. You use bullet time to focus fire for headshots or pinpoint snipers or to get out of a no-win firefight. It feels less dynamic than hurling yourself across the room, but it's a bit more tactical because you can't just leap out of the way of gunfire. You need to find cover, locate the bad guys, and pick them off. By the by, this game has named enemies (including a second-in-command blonde guy who is a coward) and you heal with pain killers. The people making this game were probably GIGANTIC Max Payne fans because this isn't a rip off, it's almost a fan conversion of Max from a cop on the run to a DEA agent with heavy firepower and often an Swat backup team. It's a mission by mission sort of game so no open world like Total Overdose but on the plus side that means no pointless running around. The world is laid out as a series of fights with escalating enemy presence and gun variety. It's short and sweet and ran pretty smoothly. So if you like Max Payne, but wish he spent more of his time standing, crouching in one place blasting everyone in the room until time returned to normal flow and they all rag dolled into a pile...this is your game!

A fairly competent TPS with bullet time built on the Max Payne engine about a hard-boiled cop in Brazil tearing it up with cartels. Gunplay is solid enough. Levels are colorful with good detailing and props. Story is your usual cliche. Some advice, it's one of those games with broken balance, so stick it on Easy to experience what most games would consider Normal difficulty. Also, mildly amusing, but it contains the very accurate and completely unlicensed likenesses of Luis Guzman and Benicio del Toro as two of your fellow cops.

This game isn't too hard, it's only about 6 hours long for a first playthrough and I found it to just be really relaxing and fun. Apparently it runs on the Max Payne engine and is very similar to those games, but I haven't played those games and wouldn't know. I found this game to be a great time, going through a fun variety of locations that all looked pretty good and colourful. For 2006 graphically this game is fine, not great but good enough. The story is pretty meh, it's really just the gameplay that makes this game worth playing and yeah the gameplay is pretty solid, you can slow down time, you can dive to the side to slow down time and shoot people as you pass a doorway, it's fun. For the 4 dollars this game costs now, its completely worth it, although apparently it can be a pain to get running on a modern computer, I have a kinda bad laptop with no dedicated GPU so I had no issues running it but if you have a gaming computer you might need to tweak some settings or files to get it to run properly.