Made Man review

Other than the Gears of War-style cover system we mentioned earlier, the game only has a couple of things to set it apart from every other generic shooter on the market. One of these is "retort killings," which you can pull off when a wounded enemy is writhing around on the floor cursing at you. Put him out of his misery with a nasty quip and a couple of bullets, and you'll get all your health back.

It's a neat idea, but it'd be a lot cooler if who writhes and who dies hadn't already been decided long before you came blasting through. You can nail a guy square in the face with a shotgun, but if he's supposed to die by retort, he'll still crawl around yelling insults at you. Meanwhile, less-important enemies will die as soon as they've absorbed enough bullets, regardless of where they're shot. So the "retort" guys are really more of a pre-placed first-aid kit that can shoot back, which would be more impressive if there weren't already first-aid kits scattered around the game.

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There's also a "kill rush" feature that slows down the action, but not your aim (you might know it better as "Bullet Time"), although it's difficult to tell exactly when you've killed enough guys to activate it. Parts of the scenery are destructible, but that coolness is offset by impassable knee-high barriers and random piles of furniture that only serve to push you along a linear path. (It also doesn't help that you can't shoot straight through windows - you need to shatter them first, then put another round through whomever's standing behind them.) And although the screens on the back of the box promise awesome fights with paired katanas, even those are slow, clunky and nowhere near as gratifying as you'd think.