So believe it or not, I don’t go out of my way to look for bad games. Unless there’s some weird natal event, I never look at a PS2 game and think, “This looks like a fucking piece of shit. I wanna play that”. No, I usually want to give the games I talk about on here the benefit of the doubt and show them some sort of respect. Be it something that pulls me in or something that intrigues me. Like I didn’t buy Marc Ecko’s Getting Up with the intent of hating it. I bought it because it looked like a fun game and I like the urban setting. It only happened to be a pile of trash. But today’s game is a game that I have no excuses for other than I saw the título and I knew right from there this wasn’t going to be a good game. It costed me two dollars and has a very unappealing box art, complete with font ripped straight from the Godfather título and with review scores ranging from, “This game is bad” to “This game is fucking bad!” So I’m not exactly excited. Ladies and gentlemen, Trigger Man.



So Trigger Man was made por Point of View Inc. Some sites say it was por WNT, whatever that is, but while the box that I have and the website MobyGames says that the game was made por WNT, the Wikipedia page says it was por Point of View. And since I can find nothing about WNT aside from a recent futebol match that is completely unrelated to the company, I’m just gonna go out on a whim and say that Point of View worked on this game. So Point of View was a studio that made very few games, none of which were really good, like Spawn: Armaggeddon, The escorpião King game, and so on. The company was privately owned and was made up of people from other studios like Interplay and Troika Games, studios that made the original Fallout games, Vampire: The Masquerade, and other, better games. In 2009, Point of View would go on to make Damnation, promoted as this big action game that was such a piece of shit, that not only did it kill Point of View, but it took Blue Omega Entertainment down with it, another mediocre studio. But hey, the publisher, Codemasters, at least survived, and has an exclusivity deal at the time of this article. With Electronic Arts… Guess there are some fates worse than death. But that’s just the developer. What I want to talk about is the publisher. Crave Entertainment published this game, at least in America. I have a love-hate relationship with Crave. They can publicar some pretty good games, like Evergrace, which I did come around to after my initial review. I do think that game deserves it’s own review. They also published Galerians, a unique little PS1 horror game. And Jade Cocoon. That’s an RPG that doesn’t get enough attention. But that’s as far as recognizable or debatably good games go. After that, it’s licensed games or shovelware bowling and pool games. Crave is like a modern sort of LJN, in a way. If you needed some stank bunda DS or PS2 game, you can count on Crave. Naturally, they were never destined to survive and went out of business in 2012. So yeah, Crave is definitely not a mark of quality, unless it’s on Jade Cocoon. So a game with a defunct developer and North American publisher. Boy, I’m excited. Now obviously, Trigger Man wasn’t solely responsible for the demise of those companies, but I really, really doubt it helped them.
So the game starts with this really bland looking título screen. Just the games título with some armas in the background and this weird trip hop beat complete with record scratching. Even for a white boy who likes a good beat, this is pretty bland stuff in comparison. It’s like something out of a bad movie from the 90s. Which, I think that’s exactly what we’re getting. It’s only gonna get worse from here. The game starts with this cutscene, or, my mistake, it has moving character modelos in an in-game cutscene, but it pauses to show a box of dialogue that takes up like fifty percent of the screen. Like this is not giving me the best first impressions. It’s a full text box with a literal paragraph of dialogue. Whatever, you are the Trigger Man, yes, that’s his name, and someone is slandering the name of the Coladangelo Family after the death of someone from the Montagano Family. Your job is to convince them you weren’t killers por robbing their casino. This game is, uh… not exactly going to win me over with its writing. I don’t mean to be a negative nancy right off the bat, but the game is giving me so much bad vibes and I haven’t even played it yet. But oh man, when we do get into the gameplay, it is not a pretty sight. So the game is in a constantly aiming point of view. You always have your gun out and are always ready to fire. Like I thought my controller was busted, but no, that's just the way it's supposed to be. But you are at the center of the bottom of the screen at all times, so it’s really, really awkward. Okay, now to be fair, this game came out a few months before Resident Evil 4 was released and perfected the third person shooting stance forever. But Max Payne came out a few years before this game did and that game was amazing. Hell, a game set in a crime drama world involving the mafia and you play as a gruff man who is a skilled shooter? Sound familiar to me. Like being in this aim in this position just makes everything awkward. And it doesn’t help that the speed for your gun is so slow. It moves in such a slow manner that aiming just feels wrong, and por the time you land a cursor on an enemy, you’ve already lost half your health. But the enemies take like a million shots to kill them. I counted. For these first level enemies, the first enemies you fight, in a shot to the chest, it takes nine bullets. Now if you can get to them before they see you, it's an instant kill. But hey, sometimes they’ll die in one hit from a headshot. Sometimes. Not like it’s that challenging or them to get hit anyway. They will stand in one spot every time. They will not chase you. It’s a miracle for them if they can even run to another corner. You just gotta inch your way to the corner and start shooting. Sometimes you can get them before they get you, other times, they’ll at least take a part of you with them. Once you got them, you just gotta unload your nine bullets into them. They will get stun locked and cannot move. And before you know it, you're all done. Oh, but that’s just the first room. This game will show you the roughness at first. But it doesn’t take long to peel back the skin to reveal the real vileness this game has.
As soon as you enter the segundo room, guards start to maneuver around the building more, moving past your slow bunda aim, and they all come at you. They do not give you a chance. But you won’t know the first time because they are hidden in the dark. Yeah, this game is surprisingly hard to see in. Like casinos should be really bright and flashy, but this place just looks dead and empty. But anyway, if you came in here without bullets, you can’t go back. Before, if you wanted to get your ammo back, you had to painstakingly go back to the start (Don’t worry, the enemies will wait for you), pick up your ammo, all thirty of them, run back to the fight and continue. But with this room having a checkpoint and no ammo until you kill these five guys, if you have no ammo, you better hope you can kill them with your faca before they get you. And with this amount of ammo being spent, I realized that, no, this game demands that you shoot enemies in the head. And then it throws enemies on a segundo floor with fucking assault rifles. You're telling me that I am going to have a slow moving character with an even slower aim with enemies that straf just as fast as I can mover my crossheir. And now you’re telling me I need to have pinpoint accuracy? Why the fuck would you put this in your game?! It’s been a while since I got this frustrated in the first ten minutos of the game. And HowLongToBeat.com says this game is like three hours. Oh dear god, kill me. So after enduring that trial, I manage to face a boss enemy. You can tell he’s a oss enemy because he’s got a rosa, -de-rosa health bar instead of the regular one. Also because he doesn’t get stun locked like the other enemies. But his AI is still dumb and you can still shoot him passed cover. And por some grace of god, he drops the shotgun. You can never fuck up a shotgun, that is the golden rule. Even Kane and Lynch 2 made the shotgun the best weapon in the game and that game was a mess. And the shotgun in Trigger Man is… eh. It’s okay. A lot better than the peashooter of a pistol I’ve had so far. So we low up the cofre and take out the guards inside of the vault… what? And then take the diamonds. But just because this game wants to get on my nerves even more, we gotta go all the way back to the start to leave. And not only that, it's a stealth section. Yeah, we can gun down security guards who were probably just doing their job, but shooting a police officer is too much. We gotta sneak around them. And every time you lose, and you will, you gotta watch the cutscene again. And even when you go to the spot that the game itself tells you is a good spot, it’s not. You will only screw yourself if you go up there because they patrol that spot. The game actively lies to you to screw you over. Whether that's true or not… I hate this game, so I’m gonna slander it all I want. Thanks to a guide from Game Marathon Runner, which I feel I’ll be coming back to again and again, I was able to realize I need to sneak around from the pool mesa, tabela on the opposite end, then then make my escape. And once I do that, I beat the level…. People, this was just level one. This was just the first twenty minutes.
seguinte level starts with a sniper section. Yep, mais precision aiming and yep, you guessed it, if you die, you gotta watch the long tracking cutscene all over again. Now the game says to avoid being seen, and while you won’t fail automatically if you get caught, they will send in two guys with body armor and assault rifles. And while they did get me twice, I was able to pick off everyone in a slow, tedious attempt to get headshots, but they were called in at the last minuto because I ran out of ammo and was lucky enough to be at a spot where they couldn’t hit me but I could headshot them, bypass their armor, and kill them. I swear, this game can either work with you or against you and it’s never consistent. After getting through some easy enemies, we meet the Don and get to fight him and his goons. With ammo outside and free health refill for good measure, all I did was hide behind the small corner and take potshots at his head poking out from cover. Even when some goons came in to help when his health was at half, I still beat him. Clearly that wasn’t what I was supposed to do because those goons were supposed to make things challenging, but since I never even set foot in the room, they were just taken off por my weak bunda pistol. You give me a shitty gun, I refuse to play por the games rules. But hey, we get his AK on the way out of the building and it ain’t too bad a gun. Also his granddaughter is there, for some reason. We just didn’t see her walk in and now she’s in charge, I guess. I’m really trying to follow the plot, but I feel like this game doesn’t want me to.
Level three is much the same. Run around a building and shoot enemies. As you can see, this game's shooting is not its strong suit, so you better believe it’s going to do the thing it sucks the most at, and make it the main advertising point and thing it does the most. And man, this game started out frustrating, but now that I just play whack a toupeira with the enemies por popping out of corners, and hoping I get a shot before they kill me, it really becomes just tedious and boring. Well until you get to the boss of this level where you are surrounded on all sides por his men and they all open fogo on you. It was also during this fight that I noticed I had a segundo knife. And it had a on it. Urns out these are throwing knives. But not just throwing knives. Throwing knives that when thrown, you can adjust their aim and trajectory to hit a target. Think like the Baterangs from the Arkham series…. But much, much worse. They mover so damn slow that it doesn’t even matter regardless. If you didn’t aim at them from the start, you didn’t hit them. Plus, what is even the point of throwing a slow faca at an enemy who can pato out of cover one moment and back in the seguinte when a bullet is faster, straighter, and gets the job done faster. So, yeah, that’s some wasted inventory space. So yeah, this boss is trash. Just hide in the elevator, and pick up the health when it respawns. There is no strategy other than run out, take some health off the boss and his goons, and run back and wait until your health box refills so you can get mais health. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that after you beat the boss, the level keeps going. Ugh! And it’s in the garage, with wide open o espaço and no hiding spots. And mais and mais enemies just pour on in. And then my PS2 crashed… Fuck. These levels aren’t long, but fucking hell, with the tedium and the frustration, it sure as hell feels long. So I endure the level again and get pincer attacked from all sides without a chance to reload my guns. It's also here where I realize that if you aren’t close enough to an enemy, even if you can see their health bar, your shots don’t count. You can’t be too far from them, even if you can see them in the distance. Now they haven't hit me with any bullets, so I don’t know if they have to follow the same rules, but still. I am shooting at them with a submachine gun. I should be able to hit them from the otherside of the garage. Especially when going out further will just get me killed from all sides again. I died about two times, came real close again, before I finally escaped. I can at least say it was the least annoying level. But not good. Not even a little.
We get into level four and…. Oh god… an escort mission. You know how people always complain about how games that come out now don’t have the same charm as the old games? Well, one thing I will always be grateful about in new games is that they completely left these behind, or at the least, if they do have them, took out all the bullshit that makes them frustrating. Enemies are much, much harder to see in this subway level and they only have their eyes on the boss. This is a double edge sword, because now I can stand out and fogo on people as the boss hides behind a wall. But this also means that if the boss dies, it’s back to the start. And since the boss loves to run out into gunfire that can kill him in seconds, I have to jump out in front and hope I can kill all the enemies before he gets himself killed. Thankfully, I did it on my first try and managed to beat the level with the boss only filled with a few bullets. And there’s a reason why it was so short. Because the leve after is a fucking nightmare. You have to kill the target, No Neck Johnny, and collect info on a toupeira in the building. Yes, there’s a toupeira in your family. Not sure when or where it came from, but I am not fucked to care. After a cutscene, you need to get through ten enemies, some with body armor and fucking machine guns, all with only two health stations before reaching the boss, who is surrounded por four other goons and has a fucking riot gun. But once you shoot him, he will run out and attack you. Assuming you don’t die on the way, you could get gunned down por the four guys huddled in one room. And if you try to run after the boss, the only guy you really gotta kill, he could just gun you down with his insanely powerful riot gun. And for this part, the health stations stop refilling. It’s one and done. Sometimes you can get it once, but other times, you can’t. It’s also here whereI realize the damn música stops and loops, so having heard it twelve fucking times in a row, I was starting to lose my goddamn mind. But I did it! I killed the motherfucker and was able to mover on to the seguinte level.
Leven six is… just… the same. mais running. mais mediocre shooting. One long section of enemies that can drain your bullets for the seguinte area or just flat out kill you and send you right back to the start. Like what else can be said about this game? It’s just the same bad shooting for two hours. And yeah, I know HowLongtoBeat said that the game is three hours, but no. If you know what to do, it’s two. It’s only three from the series of stupid deaths and the breaks you’ll need to get through this nightmare. There’s also a part here where you can open doors and find a mobster flushing a toilet… I think that was supposed to be a joke. So there’s another boss, I think is the mole, and you know the drill. Hide behind a corner, run back when you need ammo, leave. But oh, of course one level, not one fucking level can just be medicore. You can’t just be bored. You gotta be frustrated. It’s been a while since we had a stealth section, so let’s do it again. This one is twice as long and frustrating, so thank you again, Game Marathon Runner. After that, mais dark barco missions, mais blowing up crates, mais sniper sections. This game is just every bad trope and tries to do it over and over again. What is there left to say. It’s not a fun game in the slightest. It’s a goddamn slogfest. We then get the final boss fight. It’s going to take a lot of skill, a lot of strength, with all the phases of- Hide behind the corner and kill her. That’s it. That’s all it is. Why would you expect anything else? But at least the level is over after that. With that, you get congratulations from the boss, Borello was the rat, I don’t even remember who that was, and you get slow moving credits with no music…. Fuck you.
Yeah, this game is bad. This is honestly the worst game I’ve played thus far. Good job, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up. You don’t suck as bad now. Trigger Man had nothing for me. I was hoping for a hokey as hell dumb action game, but it was just a slow, boring mess of a game. I didn’t understand the story, the visuals were ugly, every level was tedious at best and frustrating at worst, the gameplay was just the worst the third person shooter genre has to offer, and I can see now why this game has gotten nothing but hate throughout. And it isn’t even so bad it’s good kind of game. This is not a Road Redemption or a Ride to Hell or anything like that. This game is a total mess and a dull, hard to see one at that. Obviously gets the título of Bottom of the Bin, right at the bottom. I’m glad this game is obscure. Fuck Trigger Man and let’s hope that it never gets worse than this again.