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Doz bad bad men of da drug cartels, dey kilt my dad an now dey gonna pay, an pay big. Cuz I’m one Loco Gringo an I’m pretty darn mad.

Are you ready for a wild and crazy romp through the Mexican drug cartels? Then put on your six shooters and grab your hat cuz Chili Con Carnage is gonna take you there and then some.

Ramiro Cruz (Ram) is on a mission. His father was assassinated in a freak combine-harvester collision after he got a leeeeetle to close to the biggest drug cartel in Mexico during his investigations. Ram has armed himself with all the latest chicken blasting armaments available to man and is working his way up the chain to the big bosses of the cartel. You get to follow Ramiro Cruz as he blasts his way from one group of drug runners to the next, using all of his chicken blasting skills to survive. Wait, did I say chicken blasting skills? Well, yes I did. In fact if your good enough, you can keep that chicken in the air for quite some time by continuing to shoot at it. By the way, you should take this game completely seriously, I mean how many shooter games do you get to play where you can grab the hat off a guy you just shot and wear it around as you kill his friends? I mean, that’s like the height of fashion sense there and should be taken seriously. Hey, you need to look good while your blasting your way through a den of thieves.

Chili Con Carnage is laid out as a series of sequential levels that you must complete to carry on to the next wave of madness. Each level has a number of objectives to accomplish, from destroying all of the manure storage tanks to finding your way through a maze to blow something up. In between each level there are mini-games/challenges for you to test your Chili skills. These challenges pit you against the chicken squad, a bunch of crazed guys in chicken suits, who come at you with a fervor. Some of the challenges involve just simply surviving, others involve completing a series of maneuvers in a certain order to succeed. Quite a few of these challenges, in fact most of them, are quite… ummm challenging to put it mildly.

The levels themselves are quite diverse and present you with differing challenges to keep the game from getting repetitive and boring. You start out in the Mexican countryside working your way through a manure farm, or maybe it’s a chicken farm, one can never tell. Though the killer chickens with the dynamite strapped their backs makes one wonder if maybe its actually a poultry terrorist training camp. You then go off to assault a cargo ship, then find yourself swinging on meat hooks in a slaughter house. How much fun is that? There is enough diversity in levels to keep you on your toes and engrossed in the non-stop action.

Some of the levels get a bit confusing, at least for me when I got turned around and ended up going back to the starting point. Other than that, they seem to be laid out fairly well. Gameplay is quite fun. How many games let you bash someone's head in and then steal their hat? Ram has quite a few acrobatic maneuvers that he can perform that are in the best traditions of the Matrix movie effects, running up walls and flipping in mid air, jumping forward, twisting in mid air and shooting a dozen guys all at the same time. Each maneuver that you perform will net you points, and there are a myriad of maneuvers to perform. In fact its been quite fun just running about and experimenting trying to come up with new and different ways to commit mass carnage. In addition, the campy aspect of the game will give you a giggle while your kicking some poor sod in the face.

Throughout the game you will collect “powerups” which will give you a number of different special powers. One is a tornado spin with a pair of Uzi’s that kills everything around you. One is a guitar case icon that gives you a mini-gun which is fairly devastating in a guitar case, and there are many more where those came from. There is also a “Rewind” powerup which you can acquire. If at some point you should die, well that’s pretty much a guarantee at some point, and you have any rewinds available, you will be given the option to either rewind, restart or quit the level. If you choose to rewind, the game will back up about 20 seconds of gameplay and then start moving forward again. This, of course, may give you an opportunity to NOT make the same mistake twice and possibly survive the encounter.

There is also a fairly nice collection of weaponry that you can pick up as you take out bad guys, from shotguns, to lever action rifles, to Uzi’s to assault rifles. There is even the occasional Molotov cocktail. With so many options, the carnage is just a trigger pull away.

Graphics are good for the PSP. There is not a lot of real detail, but with the fact that you aren’t stopping to smell the gunpowder you won’t miss it. Everything is readily identifiable and the movement of enemies is fairly evident and noticeable.

The UI seems to work fairly well. At least from my point of view it doesn’t seem to need to be very sophisticated, just a bunch of crazed individuals with guns chasing after you. So you really only need to know how many bullets there are in your gun. The UI gives you a meter with your health and how many rewinds you have available, and then tells you your current weapon. With the PSP you really don’t want a very complex UI that takes up much of the screen anyways.

The controls are a bit cumbersome at times, but I think that has more to do with the system than with the game. The weapon change buttons are on the left control pad, which can make it difficult to change weapons in a snap, especially when engaging the enemy since you have to stop moving to change weapons. Also I found that I was constantly overcompensating while moving, I don’t know if its because the joystick is to sensitive or because I just don’t have a soft touch. My only real complaint about the controls is when driving a vehicle. When you jump in you can get it going right away, even before the avatar is completely seated behind the wheel. But when you jump out of the vehicle it comes to an immediate and complete stop, which annoys me because I’d like for the vehicle to keep right on going unguided and ram stuff with out me in it.

The story line is extremely campy and silly and basically fun. Definitely not one to take seriously. But definitely one that will give you a good giggle, even with the exploding chickens. Though you may have to clean up chicken feathers from your living room floor when your done. If your looking for a carnage break, the Chili has it 