Once in awhile a video game comes out that is so hated so despised that everybody has nothing good to say about it. Today we're going to take a look at this game not because it's something that I believe is worthwhile or interesting but because it's a game that is pretty much a mass murder simulator and how could anyone find anything good about that? Let's find the positives.
In Hatred you play as a gunman and you're just kind of going around and killing everyone. That’s pretty much it. And I know what you're thinking, well Shane there's got to be some kind of story some kind of reason that everything is going on. But no in the gunman's own words:
My name is not important what is important is what I'm going to do. I just fucking hate this world and the human worms feasting on its carcass. My whole life is just cold, bitter hatred and I always wanted to die violently. This is the time of vengeance and no life is worth saving and I will put in the grave as many as I can. It's time for me to cure and it's time for me to die
So it just looks like he wants to kill everybody for no reason, which okay that's kind of a reason I guess right? Maybe whatever it's still a game that makes you go out and kill people and that's really it's only purpose. Now other games like Grand Theft Auto and maybe Manhunt offer some kind of difference in terms of violence. This one's just straight-up killing just because you want to kill people not because you need to survive. This is really just a game where you go around and kill people for no reason and that's pretty dark. The game features multiple areas where you can go around gunning people down at will whether it be suburban neighborhoods or cities it's just kind of all about that. You can go into a lot of the buildings and just massacre people that are waiting in line at a bank or you can go to a grocery store and kill everybody there. But I believe why people really don't like this game is because the controls are kind of bad. There's a lot of points in game play when the controls just work against you and don't allow you to really go full throttle killing everyone that you can. In a game like this where its purpose is just to kill people you’d think it would be designed a little bit easier that way. It's hard to aim at people, it's very difficult to drive vehicles, there's no real tactical feedback that tells you you're actually killing someone and in some instances when people are shooting at you you're not aware of it until you die. This game is set up in a way where you're just mowing down everyone like everyone you can without any pause for remorse whatsoever. The one thing that these guys did do in the game is that they removed any children but you can still go up to homeless people and shoot them in the brain because that's something that isn't as cruel as shooting children. So that's a thing. This game is dark I think we all get that so let's take a look at a couple of the positives that this game does have.
The game features a very bleak black and white color scheme but this color scheme I feel works really well with the environment. See this main character has no lust for life, no energy and no draw for anything so the entire world has lost all of its color and vibrance. I think they've done a really good job to make the player feel just dark about everything because you see the world as this main character sees the world which I think was a really smart choice. Once in a while colors do come into play like when a police car drives by you can see the red and blue lights shining on everything and you can also see TV screens turned on in certain houses. At least they were trying to do something a little different than turn the entire screen black and white. So the first positive is that this game has a very good visual style. One of the things that Hatred does really well is its use of physics. Now there are a lot of video games out there that have used physics in the past really well but Hatred is something special. See you can take grenades or rockets and kind of blow up whole walls and walk through them. You'll see things realistically crumble. You can jump through windows and see the glass shatter and fall around realistically. But that's not why you use a physics engine. You use a physics engine so that you can make use of having those walls get destroyed so one of the things you can do in this game is take a car and drive it right through a building and although it's really hard you can actually do it. And once in a while you'll see a gas main or a bunch of explosives and you'll be able to just blow it up and watch a whole section of a building just get demolished. Now that kind of visual, that kind of aesthetic, looks really good but it also is part of actually playing the games so that you can knock down walls and walk through them to avoid enemy gunfire or to basically get at a group of people that you couldn't access from the front of a building. This puts a little spin on the gameplay by giving you a different way to enter into buildings by basically making your own entrance. That's pretty cool. So the second positive is that this game has some really great physics.
I think a lot of people were mistaken in believing that this game was just a very easy mass murder simulator running around the streets killing anyone you wanted. While the game is really all about doing that it's by no means an easy task. Once the Police get involved, once the Army gets involved it's hard. I mean it's really hard. This game had me repeating again and again and again and unlike other games where you might be able to pick up a health pack or something the only way to get health back for this character is to execute people. So if you go around murdering everybody and don't strategically leave somebody just a little bit alive you won't be able to execute them and get your health back when you need it. This adds to the overall difficulty of the game and it makes for some interesting changes on the gameplay experience overall which is something I really wasn't expecting. While this is a dark way to get health back, and honestly maybe some people want kind of a lighter experience not something that's so harsh and difficult, this makes the game a little bit more enjoyable to play because its difficulty kind of gives a little bit of drive for you to keep moving forward. Even if the story doesn't want to push you forward in all of its darkness. So the third positive is that this game has a pretty interesting difficulty spike.
Now look I've played a lot of violent video games, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Mortal Kombat, even some pretty dark games like Thrill Kill, games that just feel very mean-spirited and harsh and have incredibly horrific violent scenes in them. Now while Hatred is extremely violent I find games like Mortal Kombat and Dead Space to be far more gory and more horrific. What’s happening in Hatred is violent but simply not on the same, I don't know, dark levels as what these two other games were going for. Now in Mortal Kombat there's a plot to everything and in Dead Space you're just trying to survive. In Hatred it's really just about killing people which I think was really the whole reason people hated the game. It really wasn't because it was horrifically violent they hated it because the reason you're killing people was just simply because you hated everybody hence the name of the game Hatred. So the fourth positive is that Hatred isn't as violent as people like to think it is.
Sometimes on this series I like to recommend the games that we play and in other cases I tell people to avoid them but Hatred is kind of weird. It's a really dark game that has huge inspirations from games like Postal but it really doesn’t have as good gameplay as Postal or honestly as good gameplay as any other game I've played this year. It's not the best it's not the worst. And the visual style really does make you feel dread and just sorrow. It's the kind of game that makes you feel bad when you play it. It just kind of left me with this bleak feeling. But then maybe that's exactly what they wanted to do make you feel just bad for having played a game like this. So if you want to feel bad and you want to feel hatred this is the game to play.
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