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Back when I first read about Chili Con Carnage, I was worried that its Mexploitation (I just made that word up — like it?) could sink the game. Now that I’ve spent a good chunk of time with the game, though, I can safely say that part of the game is not that bad when you take the surprisingly strong gameplay, graphics, and sound work into account. To effectively minimize the offensive aspects of the game you just have to keep three words in mind when you play it: Grand Theft Auto.

I don’t mean “It’s not as bad as GTA”, I mean to say the art style, dialogue, and caricatures of the Mexican bad guys are very much in the style of the Grand Theft Auto games. This has helped me almost entirely ignore the offensive one-liners Ram emits and the stereotyped caricatures of the Mexican criminals you are trying to kill. The fact that they are indeed criminals and that you’re out for revenge doesn’t hurt too much either.

Chili Con Carnage is an over-the-shoulder 3rd person perspective shooter at its core. Its major gameplay mechanic involves diving in one direction or another, or jumping off of adjacent objects to launch you into the air. While in the air, bullet time kicks in and you are able to pretty quickly turn and fire at enemies. The major twist that affects bullet time is how close your enemies are — the closer they are, the slower time moves, letting you take out multiple enemies during a single jump. This compensates for an occasionally tricky camera, and also acts as a clue in case you haven’t yet seen a nearby enemy. Diving through a doorway is a great tactic — if you go into slow-mo, that’s your cue to turn around, find, and eliminate an enemy.

The controls on the game work far better than you’d think they would for a shooter. The main bullet time gimmick works strongly in your favor here, turning the analog nub from a movement stick into a way to free-look and aim at your enemies. The game automatically targets enemies by just pointing at them, and you have the option to focus on your target for a headshot by pushing R1, or make the game focus on a destructable non-person object by pushing L1. The former will let you use fewer shots to take an enemy out while the latter will let you hit the old standbys of exploding barrels and crates to take out nearby enemies, or shoot thrown weapons like knives, cleavers, or molotov cocktails out of the air before they reach you. The D-pad left and right buttons switch weapons.

The weapons themselves all sound good, and the game thankfully equips you with an unlimited-ammunition pistol should you run dry of ammunition on the bigger guns. You frequently get weapons from fallen enemies, and the game encourages you to move quickly to pick them up by fading them out not long after your foe has fallen. They range from rifles to submachine guns and eventually to a rocket launcher.

I think the music also deserves special mention. It completely fits the visuals, and as you fill the combo meter with kills and combinations of kills the music will ramp up in a satisfying, action-movie way, fading as your combo meter fades out. More than once I’d be pumped up from the music after clearing a room full of enemies and be sad to find nobody left to take out to keep the tunes going.

There are also special-move power-ups and rewind icons in the game. The special moves include a variety of things, such as a tornado move that gives Ram dual-wield Uzis and has him spin in a circle killing everything nearby, a bull mode that sends him charging around, knocking over and killing everyone you can steer him into, and a golden gun move which gives you one-shot kills for a limited time complete with a bullet-cam that zooms in on your enemy’s head. Rewind icons can be activated from the Start button menu, or they can be picked from the menu that appears when you die. Rewinding takes you back a few seconds to get another chance to take a different path.

Even after my first few missions and my first boss fight, I saw that the game held promise for some longevity. Completing each level is just the start of the gameplay. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals you can earn in return for getting not-insignificant numbers of points. You actually have to try to earn them — I found myself having to actually work at shooting multiple bad guys per jump to rack up enough points to even grab a bronze medal after I knew the level. Fast thinking and reflexes are tempered by the slight wait to lock on to your next target unless you’d like to try taking them down with the automatic free-look mode you go into when in bullet time.

There are also optional challenge levels between every two or three levels that require you to do kills in certain ways and/or in certain amounts of time. These can be good training, but I did find myself not understanding how to pull off certain maneuvers a couple of times, leading me to walk away from the challenges more often than not. I didn’t notice if there was a tutorial in the game, and since I’ve rented it I don’t have the manual. When you reload your game, you can always pick any level you’ve already played or any challenge level you’ve played or passed by to try and improve your performance.

There are a couple of downsides to the game. First, the game occasionally tries to do things the engine just isn’t good at. For example, early on there’s a level where you have to escape a cargo hold on a ship as it fills with water by climbing on and jumping across crates. This kind of platforming challenge just doesn’t work well, even in small doses within a level. Second, occasionally you’ll make a wrong step in the game or a boss fight that can’t be reversed via rewind — it simply doesn’t go back far enough to undo being penned in by multiple bad guys — and restarting a level can mean a long slog back to where you got to. Also, once your rewinds are exhausted you need to start the level over again.

Just from the section of the game I’ve completed so far, I can recommend it to action game fans as long as you’re able to get past the stereotypes. It looks very good, plays quite well, and can pose a decent challenge at times. It includes local multiplayer only and several challenge levels to come back to, and it even keeps track of the best stats per level and which profile (player name) on your Memory Stick earned what stat.

See also:
Chili Con Carnage Looks Like Fun In The Sun.