Official Review PlayStation 5 Updated

Review cover El Paso, Elsewhere GBAtemp review
PlayStation 5

Product Information:

  • Release Date (NA): October 10, 2024
  • Release Date (EU): October 10, 2024
  • Publisher: Nighthawk Interactive LLC
  • Developer: Strange Scaffold
  • Genres: Third-Person Shooter
  • Also For: Computer, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Game Features:

Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative
This neo-noir bullet-time shooter takes obvious cues from Max Payne, but does it hold up on its own?

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When I first played Max Payne in 2001, I was completely blown away by the gritty story, the simple yet incredible mechanics, and the wall-to-wall action. Fast-forward some 23 years and El Paso, Elsewhere gifts us with a nostalgic blast-a-thon that takes a lot of inspiration from Remedy Entertainment's slow-motion shooter and runs with it in a fresh, supernatural direction!

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Jumping the Gun

El Paso, Elsewhere goes unashamedly hard in duplicating the awesome mechanics of the original May Payne titles by bringing slow-motion gunplay, gritty noir narrative, and pill-popping for immediate health benefits to the fore. Setting the game up you have access to all types of modifiers to tune the game to your liking, or you can choose a preset for lighter story-driven gameplay or challenging bullet hell scenarios.

The main gist of the story is that you are James Savage, a vampire hunter who ironically fell in love with Draculae, an ancient vampire queen whose blood-sucking habits, and controlling nature over you boil to the surface as you recover from your addictions and fight your demons. You must fight your way through 50 floors of hell as you descend towards the final boss. At level 30, you hit your first true difficulty spike, Djedefre, Kufu's son, and architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza in what is quite a frustrating battle!

The controls are incredibly intuitive, with the movement on the sticks as you would expect, you use the right trigger to fire, Press Cross to jump, Circle to roll, Triangle to invoke slow-mo, and use Square to open doors. The L2 button dives and fires, the direction of which depends on your movement, so you can dive forward over obstacles, backwards out of danger, or sideways to avoid attacks, all whilst popping a whole bunch of caps in bullet time!

Changing weapons is done with the L1 and R1 buttons, but honestly, I found it more intuitive to remap them to the D-Pad buttons along with D-Pad up/down to pop pills for health. Other than that, the game is pretty self-explanatory in its mechanics, just investigate, blast, and survive!

You have access to several weapons including double handguns, shotgun, uzi, rifle, repeater, grenade luncher, wooden stakes, and holy water blue-flamed Molotov cocktails. However, I tended to opt for the repeater or shotgun for close-quarters combat, and the rifle for long-range, and rarely used Molotovs other than clearing out the annoying puppet spawning magicians.

Interestingly, sniping enemies further off in the map can trigger boss fights loge before you've reached the designated area, so be mindful of having to encounter a boss who has drudged its way back through the level into a hallway to stomp you out.

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Circular Motion

The game is split into 50 levels, each one essentially asking you to forge forward, save civilians, find keys to unlock doors and then circle back blasting your way to the safety of the elevator. Each floor you stop on gets progressively more twisted and spoopy with more gothic, Egyptian and demonic themes encroaching on the already gritty corridor shooting gallery.

I found that there was a very "Unreal" feeling to the maps. Each one has lighting evocative of the old PC shooter, with purposefully low-poly modelled creatures, objects, and geometry that give off Quake 3, or Painkiller vibes. The way light bounces off the surfaces, and how the colouration also guides your way was impactful and I honestly loved every second of exploring it and painting the walls with blood.

Most levels are quite boxy, with obvious routes to take and areas staged for particular action sequences, but overall El Paso, Elsewhere has a very simplistic but cultured series of stages to overcome, some far more simple than others. Just remember that the green exit signs are what to look for if you get lost after completing your tasks and need to make your way back.

As you progress through levels the roofs come off, objects stack paranormally, and things get increasingly strange, which though slightly distracting and interesting to behold at first, skews the gritty, realism of the gunplay, I mean, blasting werewolves with pump-action shotguns in a graveyard is one thing, but gunning down biblically-accurate angels with a rifle across seas of swirling void and space in a fractious world is.. also oddly satisfying and compelling, so accept it!

The game doesn't take itself seriously, except for in the dialogue, where the performance is utterly sublime.

The character of John is incredibly well portrayed throughout. You really want him to succeed, you want to know what happened, and you want to know what's next as you fight for control of your life and your sanity.

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Blood Pumping Action

El Paso, Elsewhere ups the ante with a truly banging soundtrack throughout. It's a mixture of rap, hip-hop, and big beat, that sets the tone for the juxtaposition of mindless blasting to clear waves, and tactical slow-motion pot-shots to snipe enemies in the bonce from a distance.

The music is a real testament to the production of the game, meaning that every element of the game is considered, polished, and perfectly presented for you to enjoy.

The animation of John giving his monologues is superb, with a dithered texturing, and a basic low-poly look to the character design that pairs with a very "marionette" feel to the movement and gestures.

There aren't too many enemy types in the game, though each pertains to a distinct class. Mummies are slow and gamble towards you, werewolves jump and attach with more gusto, witches have long charging ranged attacks which you must learn to dodge, angels have rapid ranged firepower, and knights have strength and armour to overcome.

Luckily, close attacks between reloads can be supplemented by using stakes. Stakes are almost overpowered in this game, delivering death blows in mere seconds against even the armoured foes. You can also swipe a single stake at a crowd of enemies to take the lot down with a well-timed attack without burning through multiple stakes.

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Badass but Limited

El Paso, Elsewhere may get a lot of praise from me, but I also understand that it is not a perfect game. the main mechanic, slow-motion, is almost an optional feature within the game, as it is not critical to use for any scenario. Use it or not; you can burst your way through the levels and vanquish the hordes with your agility and well-timed reloads. By the by, if you don't reload tactically you will find yourself dying a hell of a lot because you cannot perform any action, other than walking while reloading. Doing anything - dodging, jumping, or evading - will halt the reload animation and leave your gun running dry. It was very frustrating, and was a constant source of bother for me.

The levels are repetitive and quite basic, and given that there are 50 of them, there isn't much variety going on. The enemies are also repetitive as stated above, however, the boss fights are where my biggest gripe comes in. Some mini-bosses are stupidly simple to defeat, whereas other fights seem near impossible. The fight with Djedfre felt like an uphill struggle after managing 29 floors with very minor issues, to come to an absolute roadblock of an enemy that felt very unfair and extremely unwarranted. The way to best this is to cheese him, use dodges to your advantage and pummel his weak spots, then you can progress to the final 40% of the game, where it ramps up again. No spoilers intended here!

I personally recommend the heck out of this game because I love it for what it is. It's not trying to better its peers or influences. It's not trying to add anything unique or bespoke to the genre. And best of all, it's not costing you an arm and a leg for some great action, brilliant voice acting and storytelling, and some really slamming music to boot!

Verdict

What We Liked ...
  • Awesome art direction
  • Brilliant dialogue throughout
  • BANGING soundtrack
  • 50 stages to blast through
  • Slow-mo feels superb
  • Heaps of gameplay modifiers
  • Addictive gameplay
  • 2 endings depending on hostages saved
What We Didn't Like ...
  • Not many enemy types
  • The mid-game boss has a huge difficulty spike
  • Using slow-mo is oddly not compulsory
8
Gameplay
Fun, frenetic, furious, and devilishly tricky at times; El Paso can put you under pressure quickly with waves of enemies swarming the walls and hallways through true 360° x 360° matrix-inspired combat.
9
Presentation
I completely adore the dithered marionette-looking gritty PS2-era aesthetic. The gritty lines and story really hook you in. Pair all this with the neon lighting and strange gothic settings, and this game comes out swinging!
9
Lasting Appeal
Once you have completed the game you can always go back in making it harder, with less weapons, more buffs, longer bullet-times etc, across its 30 chapters!
8.9
out of 10

Overall

I'm a big fan of this game. It's just £15.99 and puts up more content, style, and attitude than some big-budget titles. I highly recommended it if you ever enjoyed Max Payne, just don't expect too much variety, it is after all, essentially a circular wave shooter with a badass gritty storyline.
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Review cover
Product Information:
  • Release Date (NA): October 10, 2024
  • Release Date (EU): October 10, 2024
  • Publisher: Nighthawk Interactive LLC
  • Developer: Strange Scaffold
  • Genres: Third-Person Shooter
  • Also For: Computer, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Game Features:
Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative

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