I have a vague memory of playing a strange action game on the family computer years ago. I was a little too young to really understand what was going on, but the constant trickle of colorful visuals, explosions, and the search for things to jump over in vehicles that I stole off the streets gave me a few fleeting hours of entertainment. I never really got very far in it. But it stuck with me ever since I originally got my hands on it.
The time for reminiscing is over: It’s time to talk about Total Overdose: A Gunslinger’s Tale in Mexico. Often abbreviated to just Total Overdose, this oft-forgotten game by Danish studio Deadline Games fills a strange variety of niches. Is it an action game heavily inspired by Max Payne? Is it a Grand Theft Auto clone? Is it an over-the-top arcade game similar to the likes of PlatinumGames’ MadWorld? Yes, sort of. It’s a lot of things. They’re not all great, but when the pieces do eventually come together, they form something refreshingly addictive.
Now that it’s been over 20 years since its original debut, let’s take a look at how Total Overdose managed to etch itself into my deepest memories.
An Overdose of Action
It’s 1989. You’re in the shoes of Ernesto Cruz, a DEA agent who manages to find some information about Papa Muerte — a notoriously elusive drug kingpin — after successfully raiding a militia encampment deep in the Mexican jungle. Unfortunately, it turns out Ernesto’s crew is on Papa Muerte’s payroll.
After Ernesto is swiftly killed by being thrown out of an airplane, the mission to unveil the truth behind his death falls upon his son, Tommy Cruz, who attempts to take on the Morales and Virgillo cartels in order to probe them for more information. But, in a cruel twist of fate, Tommy himself is nearly killed after being severely wounded by a grenade. Now on the sidelines, Tommy is forced to call upon his last-ditch option in order to bust the cartels, find the truth surrounding his father’s death, and pull Papa Muerte out of the shadows: Ramiro Cruz, Tommy’s gun-toting, sarcastic criminal brother. Along the way, Ramiro establishes contact with a mysterious woman named Angel, an undercover officer herself, along with numerous sadistic faces running drugs between the United States and Mexico.
The game takes itself only semi-seriously, with its handful of emotional beats often being undercut with some crude slapstick gags or some irreverent cartoon logic. It’s very much in line with what you might find in Robert Rodriguez’s Mexico Trilogy, even going so far as to include a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Desperado via a pair of machine guns disguised as guitar cases. Similarly, identifiable pieces of Mexican culture — luchadores, piñatas, bullfighting, etc. — are given a comically violent counterpart in Total Overdose‘s gameplay. Several power-ups take the form of summoning mask-clad luchadores to assist you, or tossing explosive piñatas, or charging headlong into your enemies to take them down, just like a bull would. It fits with the colorful presentation, the slightly exaggerated proportions of all the characters, and the ever-present orange filter that seems to permeate every outdoor region. It’s like stepping into a caricature of what Mexico is supposed to be.
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A genuinely surprising licensed soundtrack really helps form this purposefully exaggerated atmosphere as well. For one thing, it fits the gameplay pretty well. From Delinquent Habits’ “Return of the Tres” blaring at full volume on the game’s title screen, to a handful of tracks by Mexican rock band Molotov filling your ears during the action, it really conveys this high-octane atmosphere reminiscent of Robert Rodriguez’s eclectic filmography.
This was purposeful. A post on IGN from the team behind Total Overdose went into more detail about their specific inspirations. Other video games were only a small piece of their creative pool. In terms of the game’s presentation, movies played a key role in forming the game’s signature look:
All of us at the studio are huge film fans – which we cannot hide – and it radiates throughout the game. . . At the movies our choice of heroes are quite straightforward: the marvelous Robert Rodriguez, creator of the movies El Mariachi, Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and From Dusk till Dawn as well as Quentin Tarantino with his work on Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, Pulp Fiction and From Dusk till Dawn. Their settings and stories are just over the top.
The choice to specifically have the game take place in Mexico was also elaborated on. In their own words, it’s actually pretty simple.
We could have chosen anywhere on Earth, but we chose Mexico. Why? The reason is quite straightforward; the KAPOW engine is created specifically to render the Mexican desert, just like rendering black shadows is a key element in Doom 3. . . Oh, and the fact that we could not remember having ever seen a game set in Mexico.
You do occasionally see some cheapness come through, though. You’re able to roam around Mexico and find collectibles when you’re not participating in a mission, but instead of a seamless open world, the game’s key areas are split into condensed districts with little else to see or do. You’re not even really forced to engage with these areas on a meaningful level. You’re able to just as easily open the main menu, pick a mission, and instantly start it, even if you’re halfway across the map. Sure, you can do sick car jumps off of ramps in the meantime, but after the 20th or 30th time without anything to build towards, the novelty does wear out a bit.
Thankfully, Total Overdose‘s core mechanic does make up for the bit of fluff that it throws your way. While it’s decent fun to just run from A to B and gunning down everything that comes your way, you’re not going to get very far if you’re not putting a bit of pep in your step. If you want better rewards, better guns, and better fun, you’re going to have to kill with skill.
Amped Up on Adrenaline
Total Overdose is an action game at its core, but it’s one that embraces arcade sensibilities more than most. At the crux of everything are your points — a straightforward numerical representation of how well you’re doing. But your points come in multiple forms.
Completing a story mission or challenge mission, for instance, leaves you with a score that can reach up to three distinct thresholds, with each successive one granting greater rewards. Finishing with the bare minimum allows you to… well, move on. But going above and beyond may net you an ammo capacity increase for one of your weapons, or some useful skill points, or even a potential health increase. These are direct incentives for you to improve your overall performance.
But then you get to your global score. A total sum of points across every single mission, challenge, and whatever other activity you pursue is tracked throughout your entire playthrough, with it too acting as a way to unlock even more goodies. Reach specific milestones, unlock more stuff. It’s as simple as that. Granted, I’ve never seen a game track two separate sets of points like this, but it’s a nice way to see how you’re really doing.
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But how do you get points?
Enter Total Overdose‘s combo and style system. Combos are easy enough to understand at a glance. Chain kills together within a set amount of time, and they’ll contribute to a point multiplier that drastically increases the points you would’ve received versus those kills in isolation. You’ll have to keep this combo as high as possible while eliminating your foes with style, made possible with Ramiro’s signature maneuver: a dive that slows down time.
Max Payne comparisons aside, you’ll find that Ramiro’s means of distorting the flow of time differs pretty substantially from everyone’s favorite pill-popping detective. For one thing, it’s crucial for high scores in every mission. The dive allows you to perform a variety of acrobatic maneuvers that, when performed correctly, provide a substantial point boost to your current combo, netting you a much higher total than if you had just killed someone without them. You can bounce off walls, spin around to take out someone behind you, carefully line up a head shot (or two, if you’re quick enough), or even take out explosives that are thrown at you in mid-air to neutralize them — along with whoever threw them. If you’re really good, you can find opportunities to even chain different maneuvers together in a single dive, boosting your total points further.
Just be mindful of Ramiro’s limits. He’s not a god, he’s just a lowly criminal, and his health and adrenaline are evidence of this. Health is self-explanatory: when it hits zero, Ramiro dies. Adrenaline powers your dives, and while it refills fairly quickly compared to what you might expect, relying too much on it in a dangerous situation might lead to your undoing.
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In any normal game, dying means you’re sent back to the last checkpoint or the last point you saved your game. This is doubly true in Total Overdose. However, there is a finite amount of “rewind” power-ups that you can find throughout your journey. Instead of biting the dust whenever your health is low, you’ll automatically rewind time to a point where Ramiro was still dispensing lead and, you know, breathing. You’ll even get some additional health to keep yourself alive for longer. Rewinds can also be used manually, though their effectiveness in other situations will vary tremendously. You’ll only get so many of these, as plentiful as they are, so be careful.
The same goes for the game’s numerous other power-ups, though they’re much easier to build a surplus of. Simply swap to the one you want to use, and voila: you now have a golden gun that can one-tap enemies, or a 360° spin that takes out enemies and static props alike. These also include the aforementioned reinventions of Mexican iconography as well, with my most-used power-up being the Desperado guitars. Who doesn’t love being invulnerable while dealing a constant stream of damage?
Then you get to your guns, which… they’re guns. You point them at things and shoot. Granted, your choice of weapon does matter when it comes to enemies at different ranges, and their limited ammo pools compared to their contemporaries in other games will often force you to juggle your weapon selections fairly frequently. Grenades are also here, and they’re just as functional as they are elsewhere, if not a little middling. They do get some brownie points for having their own dedicated stylish kill, however. Tossing a grenade in mid-air, then shooting it out of the sky, is often a great way to take out multiple foes at a distance. It looks slick as Hell, too.
Everything else kinda pales in comparison. Ramiro’s movement, at least on a PlayStation 2 controller, is fine enough when you’re just running and diving around. His regular jump, though? There’s such a delay behind it, and there’s this weird inertia that follows afterward that might send you careening off of whatever you’re trying to leap onto. Platforming is limited, sure, but the few times it pops up, it’s immediately noticeable.
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As for driving? It’s fine. It’s functional, but its usefulness outside of specific moments is, again, pretty limited. Cars are plentiful, but you’ll rarely find a need to drive around unless the game directly gives you one. Races, mission-specific goals, and the occasional forklift section (no, really) are the only times I felt that driving was an absolute necessity. Even then, taking a turn too harshly causes your car to enter a strange, fixed-length fishtail that I can’t really explain in words. For driving as a whole, I’ll say this much: It was certainly a bold decision to place the forklift controls on the same thumbstick that controls the camera.
It was also a bold decision to include bosses. No sense in being all too polite here, they’re all really underwhelming. Popping a few power-ups or just unloading on them while spamming your dive is pretty much the optimal way to deal with them, as they don’t really do anything different from the hundreds of regular crooks you’ve been gunning down for hours beforehand. They’re definitely a low point compared to everything else.
Kicking Into Overdrive (Mostly)
Total Overdose as a whole is an experience that I can best describe as peaks and valleys. When you’re at the peak, you’re having a blast, mowing down gun-toting cartel thugs and heavily-armed guards with a flurry of special maneuvers and explosives and whatnot. The chaotic music only adds to the momentum, and it intensifies after you hit a certain combo count, making you really want to keep the carnage going.
But whenever that isn’t happening? Whenever you’re driving, or wandering around outside of missions, or just moving to the next combat encounter, you’re in a dull, dull valley. This is even true with all of the different one-off mechanics the game tries.
Early on, you’re taught that you can leap from a moving vehicle to send it careening into something like a missile on wheels. But outside of one other mission that comes to mind, I rarely felt a need to pursue this as a means to attack, since my guns were so much more effective. The forklifts are cool, but outside of the few instances where they’re needed, they feel like a strange addition. And the few odd minigames outside of missions, where you can kill skeleton luchadores or roam the streets as a masked madman with a melee weapon, just feel so disconnected from everything else the game has to offer. They’re just there with little rhyme or reason outside of netting you some more points for your global score.
The few technical bugs that you find throughout only dampen the experience further. Melee attacks are useful whenever there’s an enemy that’s a little too close for comfort, but the hit detection for triggering them is a bit bigger than the actual attack itself. On more than one separate occasion, Ramiro would just be swinging wildly in front of himself while a gun-toting cartel member turned him into Swiss cheese. I occasionally got stuck in the environment, too. The worst of this was during the final level, which involves chasing down a train on a motorbike. My manual rewind would only go back to the exact point where I got stuck, and thankfully, I was able to manually free myself instead of having to reload a previous save.
What’s ultimately interesting about all of these issues, though, is that they’re mostly remedied by the game’s lesser-known PlayStation Portable counterpart, Chili Con Carnage.
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A loose reimagining of the original game, Chili Con Carnage dumps you into a more strictly linear, level-based version of Total Overdose that doubles down on its over-the-top humor and straightforward action while skimming a lot of the fat that you’d find in the original game. For instance, instead of being dramatically flung from a helicopter to his death, Ernesto Cruz instead meets his end incredibly abruptly in his own office — on his birthday, no less. After a comforting gift of flowers and kittens brought to him by Ramiro (no, really), Ernesto is unfortunately taken down by… a wheat thresher that inexplicably smashes through his office and turns his body into several limb-bound bales of hay. Ramiro even buries each of his pieces in their own separate coffin. The absurdity never really comes down from that point.
Given the limited hardware that ran Chili Con Carnage, I almost want to say that that version of the game feels more in line with what I would’ve wanted out of Total Overdose. It’s a little more focused, a little more slimmed down, a lot more bombastic, and a bit more refined in a few key areas. While it’d be redundant to go over all of its minor changes compared to the original game, it’s still something worth mentioning due to its interesting novelty. It’s probably the first time I’ve seen a non-Japanese developer make what’s essentially a parody of their own game series.
Should You Play Total Overdose?
Total Overdose is admittedly hard to fully recommend as a complete experience. Its individual parts mashed together are fairly interesting, and the whole vibe of the game, being a bizarro version of Mexico that indulges in the culture’s colorful iconography, makes its weaker elements a bit more tolerable. But an issue presents itself the longer you play: Whatever Total Overdose does, other games since its release seem to pull it off better.
As I kept playing, I couldn’t help but think of MadWorld, and how that game more directly incentivized its over-the-top action with way more set pieces and unique scoring scenarios and even bosses. There’s even driving, but it’s meant less as a way to facilitate traveling in either direction, and more as a way to provide an alternate way to engage with the game’s bosses. The comparisons are all the more appropriate after I dug up an archived interview with GameReactor on YouTube, where the game’s lead level designer and creative director mentioned that the studio was only open to creating original properties, barring a special exception:
“They come with all the, like, the film licenses — all the publishers, they have film licenses, and they want us to do, I can’t tell you what licenses, but very big licenses. . . but of course, we only want to do our own stuff. We could be tempted [to work on licensed projects], if it’s cool enough. I would love to do Sin City. That’s a title I would love to do.”
Seeing as how MadWorld is as close to a Sin City game as you can get in terms of its presentation and atmosphere, I can’t help but feel like that game does what Total Overdose does in a much more focused and impressive way.
But I still felt compelled to finish Total Overdose. Maybe it was its cartoony humor. Or maybe it was that compelling gameplay loop of racking up points as high as you possibly can. Maybe it was both? Whatever it was, I did ultimately have a good time with it.
Should you play it yourself? I wouldn’t say no, but you should be aware that this is far from a perfect experience. On PC especially, I had such a difficult time getting things to work properly that I opted to just snag the PlayStation 2 version instead. But if you can tolerate some of its weaker aspects, what you’ll find is a game that really hits a certain switch, one that evokes the same kind of goofy fun I had so long ago.
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A small snippet of the same interview, found in a separate installment on YouTube, ultimately sums up why I enjoy Total Overdose as much as I do. The origin of the game came up, and while the duo being interviewed casually chatted about the game’s story, a point regarding realism in games came up:
Actually, it all started with, you know, at the time when we started Overdose, there was a big tendency in games that they had to be very realistic, and realism was like the big thing. It had to be super realistic. In my personal life, I have enough realism. I want to do something which is beyond realism. A lot of us, at that time we watched — and I’ve always been a fan of over-the-top ancient film, not just the ancient films of Arnold Schwarzenegger and so — but more like the John Woo stuff . . . And we thought, okay, it would be cool to be this like, super cool, over-the-top, action hero, who could actually do all the stuff that you can’t do in real life. And also to make a game that has a lot of humor. That was like, the basic gameplay idea. That you could just do all these, like, totally wacko crazy action stuff.
You can certainly see the creative spirit that went into Total Overdose, despite its few flaws. While the growing trend of incorporating realism into games wouldn’t come to a head until the 7th and 8th generation of consoles, it was still fun to see such an inspired vision come to life not only once, but twice. Having touched it only a handful of times when I was incredibly young, it was rewarding to ultimately see this through to its conclusion. Hopefully, others may feel the same way.
Total Overdose is currently available on GOG. You can also find used copies for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, in addition to Chili Con Carnage being available for the PlayStation Portable.
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