Welcome to Eat This, a 2D side-scrolling shoot-em-up. A game that has as silly a plot as it’s name. To elaborate clearly on this point and to give you a brief background to the game, I will quote from the Readme:

"You're Leon, driving home to the city of New York unaware of the danger overhead. While the city goes to bed, aliens are unloading their gear. Tons of highly explosive stuff, destroying half of the city on their way, with no respect for our bricks, our cars, our statues, our monuments, our well-being! Leon is the right guy to do something about it. He is determent to kill every single alien on earth, and blast them back into space."

In my opinion, this storyline is silly and badly written. The developers may be from Sweden, but that is no excuse not to hire someone qualified to write their copy. As you can imagine, this kind of shabbiness continues throughout this uninspiring game.

Graphics:
In a quick summary, I'd have to say the graphics are unclean, unpolished and sometimes downright ugly. There are no remarkable aspects to garner with praise and I felt I was sucked into a portal taking me back to 1993. The animated characters and objects in the game are way below par and serve to bring a sloppy feel to the game. The backdrops are average, and do somewhat add to your surroundings. Indoor backdrops are hideous and boring causing you to wish you were outside again. Speaking of outside, there are some minor effects such as rain and lighting which are not entirely beautiful but do add to the atmosphere. The explosions I encountered from trip-mines and other grenade-throwing baddies were not at all dynamic.

Sound:
Very little effect was put into the audio factor of Eat This. The explosions and gunfire sounds are monotonous and boring. In fact, most sounds are of standard variety which is disappointing because with a game like this you need fun, exciting sounds to keep you gripped. There are an abundance of ambient sounds which helps a little with the atmosphere.

Gameplay:
In times like these, innovation is the key for a game to stick up above the rest. With so many games sporting fancy graphics and amazing sound effects, you need to be different, even if you don't have good graphics and sound. As you have just read, Eat This does not satisfy those needs and unfortunately suffers in the gameplay department too. 2D side-scrollers were done to death in the early days of gaming and to add life into a genre you need something special and new. Eat This is no help in this regard. The plot is paper-thin allowing for this game to be quickly forgotten.

When I first got this game, I thought happily to myself that I'd have a chance to use my mostly unused gamepad, but this was not to happen. To control your character, you use the directional keys for movement and use the mouse to aim your fire with a crosshair. There are very few puzzles and your goal is to collect keys to open doors and therefore finally advance to another level. The uncommon puzzles that are present seem to involve nothing more than flipping switches to get the right combination. The style of gameplay is simplistic and it takes no more than 30 seconds to learn to play. There is a good variety of weapons that can be found, but there is nothing overly special that can be mentioned.

Fun Factor:
Strangely enough, with hardly anything going for it, I started to enjoy playing Eat This for awhile. There's something about the lack of depth and the ability to just jump and shoot and run without much thinking got me enjoying the game. Although this fun did not last as the game got boring very quickly.

Overall Impression:
This is not the worst game I have played recently, but it sure does come close. Although that's what you can expect from a game with lousy graphics, mildly irritating sounds and unoriginal gameplay. Nothing I experienced in the game would make me want to come back to it after my review was complete. I wish I could even say there was potential for a game like this.