Trigger Man: Please Shoot Me Now

Trigger Man is such a terrible mess of a game. It is so bad that when I had a party in celebration of poverty games and encouraged people to go and buy the cheapest shit they could find, two people showed up with copies of Trigger Man, and neither spent more than two dollars on it. Trigger Man is so bad that the “reception” section of its wikipedia page is just a bulleted list of its faults. It is so bad that I've seen more than one person try to play it for over an hour and never finish the first level. This game is so bad that it is Point of View Inc.'s worst game, and they made the NFL Blitz sequels.

I can't really tell what the selling point of this game is. The package has this awful art, and the most creative part of this game is that the T in the title is an uzi, though I'm not sure what that extra line on the M is supposed to be. The manual credits the package design to a company called Binary Pulse, whom I've never heard of, but I think needs to be called out for this sort of shit.

Okay, there is one thing that is more creative than the logo. On the back of the box it advertises a feature called “Knife-cam” which gives the player a first-person view for throwing knives, which can then be steered. That's right, this is the only video game that allows the player to play as a throwing knife. Trying to fathom the logistics of a knife-cam, not in the game, but in real life, never ceases to bewilder me and make me laugh. I picture a combat knife with a camera taped to it, but with thrusters on various sides to enable steering. I can't confirm whether or not this feature is actually in the game, because I never had the heart to play past the first level.

The game just doesn't play well. Despite it being a PS2 game with dual analog controls, it feels like one of those early PS1 third-person shooters, before anybody figured out how to make things not suck. Even the first Syphon Filter felt more natural than this. There is just no reason to play Trigger Man, something the wannabe Matrix music should have tipped you off about. If you want a game that's about the mob and shooting people, just play the 2005 Punisher game, which was like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater of killing dudes. One sad fact is that this game was released in 2004. Just consider the fact that Max Payne came out in 2001, and Max Payne 2 came out in 2003. How was a game so far behind the curve ever released?

I played the game up until the part near the end of the first mission where you have to stealthily avoid the police. The only thing this game does worse than shooting is hiding. Still, almost beating the first level put me further into the game than anybody else who I witnessed trying to play it. This game is just awful and it deserves to be a game that is clogging the sub-three dollar bins with all the old Maddens and other sports games at every used game store in the country.