Let's get it straight: this doesn't have the technical polish of something like FEAR or the stylistic polish of Total Overdose or the upcoming Just Cause. What it has is a slew of third-person shooter conventions and lots of bad guys. You're an elite DEA officer and - after losing one too many officers (like everyone in the South American HQ) - it's time to take the fight to the drug lords.

At its best, El Matador has the potential to crack that raw arcade feel you sometimes miss on the high-gloss numbers. You've got a whole heap of weapons, revenge, and boss battles where you see a health bar at the top of the screen telling you how you're going against the big bad. You have enemies and level layout that feel a little like Operation Wolf, Time Crisis or any other arcade shooter you'd care to mention.

If you strafe and hit jump you'll do a sideways roll. You collect health packs like candy. If you hit TAB you get the game's slo-mo, bullet-time, feature. Enemies aren't particularly tough, but then again, neither are you. Blasting through levels tends to require careful use of the right-click aim function from cover, or a lot of well-timed slo-mo sequences.

The slo-mo feature is surprisingly well balanced (which might be more luck that design). For starters, it doesn't slow incoming bullets enough to be useful as a defensive measure, which means that it, basically, becomes a precision targeting system so you can take the time to line up your shots with great accuracy. The thing is that your big weapons either seem to take too long between shots or are full-auto and tend to spray bullets around your target, which negates most of the “great accuracy” advantage. This meant I ended up going with the humble pistol and precision headshots. Like I said, it was pretty well balanced.


Where the game could go bad or come together is with the final gameplay tweaks. At the moment some elements just trip over one another - things like the right-click aim function. At the moment, it is easier to shoot straight with an AK-47 and forgoing the zoom-sight that comes with the M16. It's like the developers decided the game would switch to feel like more of a first-person tactical sim in the aim mode.

With the M16, for example, you have to target the enemy's left knee because the gun has such fierce recoil up and to the right. It might be realistic, and it might grow on you as you learn the weapons, but it's a lot easier to use the AK and put the middle of the bad guy in the middle of the sight and only use zoom when you're losing the target against the background in the distance.

Your accuracy does go up if you're not moving and haven't just peeled off a round, but this is a fast-paced third-person action game. If I've lined up my shot while dodging enemy fire and rolling behind cover, I want to hit what's in my crosshairs. Like I said before, this system could work to add depth and give each weapon a special use and a feel, or it could just end up as bunch of cool-sounding shooter elements rattling around together. It all depends on whether the preview code shows the gameplay as they want it, or whether it shows a stepping stone on their way to specific design goals.

The preview build I played had three distinct levels. The first was an urban street setting of narrow alleys and squat tenements on either side (think Time Crisis), the second was a drug lord's jungle base, and the third was a heavy industrial dock. None of them gave a great feel for the story, but none of them made me feel that I was missing much because of it.

So, while this romp against Columbian drug lords, the “Narkomafia”, ate Anthony's brain in one of his Digital Curtain articles, I can say that El Matador has the potential to be a surprisingly fun shoot ‘em up. A little old-school even. On the other hand, it could just take its multitude of shooter elements, shake them up and leave them how they happen to fall. Being pragmatic the second option is probably more likely, but one of the joys of this business it that we won't know for sure until the final review code comes through. We'll give you the full scoop when it does. Toro!