Torrente is a budget title that gives you a lot of gameplay for your money …
unfortunately that gameplay is at best repetitive and at worst frustrating and
pointless. You get what you pay for, right? Or maybe even a little less…
The game is based on a Spanish movie that did quite well in that country but
that has not made much noise beyond the Iberian shores. Torrente is an
incompetent boob who somehow manages to succeed in law enforcement in spite of
himself. He is Spain’s answer to Inspector Clouseau, except for the racism,
sexism, alcoholism, and a whole slew of other ‘isms’ that he suffers from. In
case you aren’t familiar with the character or his mordant personality, a grainy
opening sequence of Torrente in a hot tub groping three women and a handful of
one-liners repeated ad infinitum during the game will clue you in on his charms.
I can’t quite tell you about the game’s storyline because even after playing the
game I am not really sure there is much of one. You get a series of missions
that include disarming bombs, escorting people, and just plain killing every
thug in sight, but their connection to each other doesn’t seem to go beyond the
fact that you see the same handful of criminals throughout.
The game can be played in first or third person view, but neither seems to
work too well. In third person view it is difficult to aim your weapon
consistently and you turn around so slowly you can get to “three Mississippi”
before you can even get the chance to fire at an enemy behind you. In first
person view you lose too much peripheral vision and you won’t believe how often
an enemy will be standing behind you, clubbing you over the head with a baseball
bat without you even noticing.
Fortunately, someone standing behind you beating you over the head with a bat
is not a medical emergency. For some reason, this fat and out of shape police
officer is a tank and can take a few dozen bullet wounds and other injuries
before dying. Since the aim of your enemies is bad … we’re talking a
Stormtroopers armed with blasters kind of bad here … you hardly even get hit
that often. It’s such a joke that you’ll often find yourself ignoring enemies
shooting at you because you don’t want to go through the hassle of killing them.
Not that killing them is a challenge, mind you, it is a repetitive hassle. They
all do one of two things: stand in place shooting at you with an occasional step
to the right or left or come right at you in a beeline. The only challenge is in
getting your target cursor to go to the right spot. Most will die with one shot,
although sometimes the first shot will make them fall down and then get up a few
seconds later. You can’t really tell at first if they are dead or wounded, but
in general if you hit them from the waist up you’ve killed them and if you shoot
them below the belt they’ll stand up for round two.
Torrente does have a weakness one it comes to rockets and cars, though. The
game loves to artificially up the difficulty by sprinkling the levels with some
hidden one-shot kill enemies, so expect your share of random instant deaths. Did
I mention that you can’t save mid-level and will have to start over if you
didn’t know there was a rocket launcher around a corner? Cars are another deadly
force in the game. The streets are filled with traffic that mostly just sits
there, but occasionally decides to start moving. If you’re standing in the
street (and the levels consist mostly of street) and you don’t see a car start
to move behind you, then it’s instant death time and back to the mission select
screen for you.
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