Let me just say: wow! I was not disappointed while playing the demo.

The game was fun, the graphics were great, and the music? Few games made by a large commercial development studios have music this awesome that fits the game so well. The demo itself was long enough to me a good taste of what the gameplay was like. This was everything a good indie game should do, in one convenient demo. What makes it even more impressive is that it seems one person did the majority of the artwork, programming, and design. Truly impressive work for a tiny development team.

Mexican Motor Mafia puts you in the role of a nameless bad-ass referred to as “The Cobra” at one point in the game. A gang called the Red Texas Four killed your brother, a law-enforcement officer and saint on earth. They kidnapped his children, your family. So, now you gotta go blow things up in order to save them. Perhaps not the deepest story, but it gives you an excuse to shoot your guns from a fast-moving car.

The game starts with you on an overhead map of northern Mexico. You drive your beater car around to different places, going faster if you stick to the roads. Other cars travel the map, including smugglers that you can attack for loot and bandits that don’t like you. You can visit cities to trade supplies, buy guns, upgrade or repair your vehicle, and get jobs. Most of the game will be spent finishing jobs, which range from the mundane delivery jobs to hunting down the criminals that killed your brother. Most missions give you some cash reward, in addition to some items looted from the enemies in the form of trade goods; these can be bought and sold at towns. Each town has a different price for some goods, so you could even make a some cash by running goods from one town to another for a profit. Other missions will reward you neat weapon upgrades like RC car bombs or a JATO pack.

Most missions involve combat. You drive to a location, or find a wandering bandit, and the game switches to a location. You must now defeat all the enemies in this area before you can leave. All you have to do is shoot them multiple times and destroy their vehicles. Unfortunately, they like to shoot back and damage your vehicle as well. So, you have to drive around and dodge enemy fire with direction keys while aiming and firing with the mouse.

There are a wide variety of weapons in the game. They include simple weapons like a double-barrel shotgun or generic “gat”, to more powerful weapons like street-sweeper shotguns or LAW rockets. The interesting part is that you have two weapons, one for the left and right sides of your vehicle. Which weapon you fire depends on which side of the car is facing the crosshairs. If you don’t have a weapon on that side of the car, then you cannot fire from that direction. You also cannot fire directly forward or backwards from your car, so you have to do quick drive-bys. Fans of naval simulations might recognize a familiar tactic here known as “crossing the T.” This means you want the side of your car facing the front or back of the enemy’s car so that you can fire on them but they cannot fire back.

If you are destroyed in combat, all is not lost. You lose all the trade items you were carrying around, and have to pay quarter of your cash on hand to have your car towed back to town. Losing is just a minor setback, allowing you to go tackle that mission once again after a small bit of downtime. Just make sure you don’t have a trunk full of expensive pills before tackling a challenging mission, otherwise you’ll lose it all.

Once you defeat your opponents, time to head back to town to sell off your loot and repair your vehicle. After accumulating enough cash, you can upgrade your vehicle. Vehicles have different stats, such as room for weapons, room for hauling, structure, and speed. There are also other stats, such as acceleration, which are not shown. As you get more money, you can buy better cars with better stats. You can also buy better weapons, but these weapons must fit within the limits of your vehicle, and better weapons are bulkier and only fit in better cars. More advanced weapons and vehicles become available as you open up other areas in the game.

Your overall goal is to find each local member of the Red Texas Four gang and bring him to justice. Vigilante justice, that is. After killing the gang member, you get a nice cut-scene with information about where the next gang member is located. Finishing the first two chapters also opens up another section of the map for you to explore, with new cities, new weapons and guns, and new jobs to do. There are four gang members to eliminate, and the demo lets you play to the point right before you go fight the second gang member.

One of the most notable things about the game is that the production values are very high. The game is primarily 2D, but don’t hold that against it; all the graphics are incredibly detailed and very nice looking. For example, the cars look like photographs of actual model cars which make the game look really great. Fancy 3D graphics would have distracted from the game experience, likely bogging down older systems. The sounds are clear, and the music is wonderful. There is a nice variety of southwestern-styled guitar music that fits the setting absolutely perfectly. This is one game where you won’t turn off the music due to boredom after a few hours of play.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t perfect, as there’s one major flaw: the main game is simply too short. As you accumulate power, you can power through the missions and finish off the game just a little too quick. A serious gamer might spend only 5 or so hours playing the game, and a less experienced gamer might spend one or two more hours on top of that. After you accomplish the final goal of killing the last of the Red Texas Five, you can still travel the world and finish quests you didn’t do before. However, you’ve likely gotten the best vehicle and weapons by that time, so anything else you do is not likely to be meaningful. It is fun to play the game through again, so there is some replay value.

The has also benefited from recent patches. One patch added multiplayer options to the game, allowing you to fight it out with other humans or bots. Deathmatch type gameplay comes in two flavors: Free-for-all and teams. You kill your opponents, and as you kill more opponents your bankroll increases, which gives you options for buying a replacement car and weapons to get back into the game. However, other players buy from the same list, so you need to act quick to get choice weapons. The other type of multiplayer is a soccer game, where you shoot a barrel and try to get it into a goal area to score points.

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to play much multiplayer. The only public server usually available seems to be empty most of the time, and killing bots isn’t much of a challenge. I imagine the game would be a lot of fun with other players, but I haven’t had the chance to try it out. However, even that public server hasn’t been available recently.

Another patch added more missions to run. Unfortunately, most of these missions seem to be repeats of previous missions. For example, some missions that have you hunt down a bandit with names like “Evil Roberto” or “Evil Jesus” seem to appear frequently in some towns. This does provide some more gameplay, but not enough to really make the game seem significantly longer, in my opinion.

The game also seems to be easily to mod. The developer has posted some information on the game forums about how to add new weapons, cars, missions, etc. The game is partially written in the Lua scripting language, so you can alter the script files that come with the game to make your own version.

Overall, the game is excellent. High production values, good story, great gameplay, and lots of fun to be had. However, the game really needs a bit more to it in order to reach the lofty goal of near-perfection. Given the nice price point, it’s worth spending the money to play an exceptional game of this quality. What the game lacks in length, it makes up for in sheer quality and fun.

Graphics: Excellent. The 2D graphics are detailed and very good looking. The vehicles look like they might even be from photographs of model cars. The overhead map with hand-drawn details, the individual locations with a variety of obstacles and walls, and car images all have exquisite detail. The cutscenes are drawn in an illustrated style, very appropriate for the setting. Overall, the graphics really add to the experience.

Sound/Music: Absolutely awesome. The sounds are clear and fit the game well. The music is some of the best I have heard in a game in a while. Ten full-length songs that fit within the setting are used to great effect to establish the setting. The developer probably spent considerable effort and time lining up these wonderful songs. One of the high points of the game.

Control: Smooth and responsive. The cars moved as you would expect, and I had few problems. Aiming with the mouse is easy enough. My only complaint is that it is very easy to get into stupid positions near the edge of the screen, especially with enemies on your tail running into you. It gets easier as you get used to the controls, which is pretty quick. In addition, the UI is a bit clumsy in some places like the trade screen, but in general it gets the job done.

Gameplay: Very good. Learning how to move your car to keep firing at an enemy added a lot of depth to the combat, which was already very fast and exciting. The variety of weapons also kept the game from getting stale too quickly. I also really enjoyed the main story of hunting down the gang and continuously upgrading your vehicle. The missions were just varied enough to keep interest, although there was some repetition. However, the main story is just too short. A recent update did add more to do, but the game still feels limited. There is some limited replayability given the different difficulty settings, and the game is still fun when you play it again a little later.

Multiplayer: The game offers simple solo or team-based deathmatch (or an interesting soccer-type game) as an option. It appears that someone used to have a server running for people to play on. However, the many times I went online and played for a while, I rarely saw anyone else log on, and the server hasn’t been available recently. The deathmatch is fun enough, but the bots that fill in for players are not terribly bright so they are easy to beat.

Extras: The system was written in the Lua scripting language, and the files appear in the installation of the game. It’s easy to go in and alter things, and some technical information has been provided on the game’s forums. In theory, mods to the game should be easy to develop. A potentially excellent project for an aspiring game developer.

Demo: A game that does it right! The demo allows you to enjoy a significant portion of the game before you are required to purchase the game to continue. You will get a very good idea of what the game is like from the demo. Playing the demo will likely make you want to purchase the full game.

Overall: An absolutely wonderful game in every way except one: the game is simply too short. It would be nice to have some more to the game, and not just repeats of the missions that have come before. If there were a bit more to the game, this would easily be one of my favorite games of all time. Let me repeat; every other element is top-notch from the music to the graphics to the story to the gameplay. It just ends way too soon. Overall, I think it’s still worth the price of the game to experience it; it might not be the most entertainment for your dollar, but it is an exceptionally good game that you should experience to see how quality an indie game can be.