When Grand Theft Auto received mainstream attention with the release of Grand Theft Auto III (2001), everyone and their uncle wanted to make their own open world game, with very few actually actually worth playing (including Grand Theft Auto III itself). This game is one of those. Total Overdose is an open world game taking place mostly in some city on the U.S.-Mexico border, although towards the end you do cross the border into the U.S. As of right now, I played through the entire story and did every single side-mission except 2 which took me around 12-15 hours in total. Even at the low price, I would say there isn't much fun to be had in playing this game.
There was no reason for this game to be open world: there's nothing to do in the world besides wander from mission to mission. There is no interactivity, the police don't chase you, and the driving mechanics are awful. If you look hard enough, there are some interesting parts of the city (for example, a drug store that doubles as a wedding chapel and the fact that the red light district is in the same part of town as the cathedral), but the various frustrating game mechanics made me want to spend as little time in the open world as possible. To the game's credit, you are able to teleport to mission locations so you don't have to spend too much time experiencing the driving mechanics if you don't want to. The side quests range from thoroughly uninteresting to maddening in the case of races and forklift missions). The main story is barely coherent, it made no sense and I was glad when it was over. Something about a twin brother degenerate of a DEA agent tied up state-side having to go in and avenge their father's death. The missions weren't much different from the side missions, although it did get a bit more entertaining at the end. The last mission was excellent and partly redeemed the game in my eyes at least.
The graphics are awful for 2005, they look like they belong in a game from around 2001 or 2002; however, I have never really cared about graphics. About the only good thing this game has to offer is the gunplay. It introduces a game mechanic I really wish survived to this day called "shot dodge", where you can attempt to dodge bullets by jumping out of the way and putting the world into a slow motion state. That feature alone sets this game apart from every other GTA-like, but unfortunately the rest of the gameplay is wanting in several places. Melee combat is just not worth it as it's not an instant kill. The game doesn't make it particularly easy to avoid melee either - if you attack too close to an enemy the player character melees automatically, regardless of the weapon he is holding. This destroys the intensity of combat situations, as you have to stop running around, smack an enemy, and then go back to running; you will also sustain a ton of damage as there are probably multiple people shooting at you and having to stop makes you an easy target. There are way too many guns, which made it frustrating trying to find the exact weapon I wanted in combat situations; this is exacerbated the the fact that many of the guns are effectively duplicates (e.g. akimbo sawed off shotgun vs. "combat" shotgun). There are a series of collectible powerups, although I couldn't tell you what most of them do because I only used around two of them in my entire playthrough. There's also an item that allows you to rewind time by around 5-10 seconds which helps with the fast-paced nature of the game, death does not really mean death until you run out of rewinds. Of course, with this mechanic it's possible to get stuck à la the series finale of Futurama where you can't rewind time enough to get out of a bad situation. The inclusion of fall damage really detracts from the "arcadey" feel, I had way too many awesome moments cut short because I jumped from too tall of a height. As for the music, I don't remember any songs or music in particular except the main theme, which was excellent.
As previously mentioned, the driving mechanics are awful. It seemed to be a very simple state machine with 3 states - straight, turn, and skid. The transition from "turn" to "skid" is not smooth at all and seems to be activated after spending a certain amount of time in "turn"; transitioning from "skid" back to "turn" takes way too long and it is impossible to control the car during the transition which caused me a lot of frustration especially during the race missions. However, you are able to dive out of a moving vehicle and have it explode on impact without taking damage, which made entrances a lot more interesting. None of the cars are especially interesting to drive, although there are "bonus" cars that spawn in certain places. One thing this game did right with the driving is if it detects you're stuck on geometry, it will teleport you to a safe location so you don't have to reload a save; modern vidya are too obsessed with "muh immersion" to implement this which is a shame.
When I started the game, I had a feeling that "normal difficulty" would be trivial just from the vibe the game gave off; I was correct in this assessment. The game was indeed very easy up until the last couple of missions even on the hardest difficulty. If you have a pulse, go with the hardest difficulty unless you are REALLY bad at video games. The only form of "progression" in this game is gaining additional weapons and gaining the ability to hold extra ammo for those weapons. On the hardest difficulty towards the end, you have to face off against so many enemies and every gun does so little damage that you will run out of ammo regardless of how far you've progressed rendering progression worthless in my opinion. You can only save at certain locations, and the game autosaves after every mission so it has an acceptable amount of backtracking.
Game source - GOG (5.99 USD)
GPU - AMD RX580 8GB
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
OS - Linux (ran with Wine on Lutris)
Control - Mouse/Keyboard