El Paso Elsewhere is all about love — from a love of rap and hip-hop, Max Payne-style shooting, and the love of messy relationships. When the game hits its target, it can be great to play, but I wish it happened a little more.
Savage Reading
Our story is about John Savage who has come to the town of El Paso to stop his ex, the vampire queen Draculae from ending the world. Standing in his way is the mysterious void, monsters, and the fact that he may still have feelings for the woman who broke his heart…metaphorically. The story leans heavily into the style of Max Payne, as John (wonderfully voiced by writer/designer Xalavier) muses about what’s going on, the fact that he’s on a murderous rampage, and what this means for the woman he once loved. Despite the cutscenes featuring mostly still shots, the voice acting and angles all give it a beautifully stylized appearance.
Slo Mo Shooting
The nods to Max Payne don’t stop at the story, as John will be going into bullet time, diving around, and using a variety of guns to stop monsters from taking a bite out of him, all to a hip-hop horror-infused soundtrack. The structure is that each stage has hostages that need to be rescued to access the elevator to go down to the next section of the void. Enemies will be waiting and spawn around the player. Besides your guns, you can break objects to find stakes that can be used to one-shot most enemies and are required for taking out elite enemies and bosses.
The game emulates the Max Payne style of shooting to a tee.
The gunplay is good, but doesn’t elevate or change anything from the original Max Payne. Not helping matters is that the enemies all have basic attack patterns: they either charge at you or just move around shooting a projectile.
And this is where El Paso Elsewhere falls a bit short for me.
Shooting Into the Void
The game’s style is that every stage is meant to harken back to the dream logic and mysteriousness of the dream sequences from Max Payne and the trippier levels of Control and Alan Wake. The problem is that when everything is set to be trippy, it loses the ability to stand out. There are some great shots of the environments with the world that look like it was stitched together from different places, but that is not translated into the gameplay for the most part. Most of your time is going to be spent running through nondescript hallways trying to find that remaining hostage or a key and then immediately dealing with a wave of enemies that spawn in.
The game also has that problem with how your bullets are generated at the point of the reticule and not from the character model. There were plenty of times when an enemy got so close that pointing the cursor directly at them, the bullet would spawn past them and the enemy continued to get free hits. And with most enemies being of the “get as close to the player as possible” variety, meant this happened a lot.
Despite all the action and music, the main hook is the fantastic story.
The levels that purposely don’t follow the standard script are the best ones in the game and I would have liked more of that style to help break up the pacing.
You can find hidden collectibles in the form of lore that paints a greater picture of John’s and Draculae’s relationship and other easter eggs. The story does carry this more than the gameplay, and the levels that ended without any new story beats just felt like padding in a way.
The main issue for me with the game is that while the story was excellent, and did keep me interested to the end, it rarely interacted with the gameplay itself. It didn’t matter how many bathrooms, castles, and meat lockers I ran through if all I was doing was slow-mo diving while shooting angels and vampires with a rifle.
Love is all you Need
El Paso Elsewhere is a love story first, and a third-person shooter second. If you’re hoping for the other way around, then you might end up disappointed. But the game is a great example of how a strong aesthetic, story, and cinematography can elevate. If you’re looking for an amazing stylized story, with some shooting along the way, then you should check this one out.
This was played with a press key from the developer
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