Hatred is a game that longs to be hated, but it’s difficult to work up the enthusiasm for a half-hearted eye-roll.
It’s been controversial but, honestly, most of the controversy has been about the feuding around the game rather than the game itself. Now that it’s here, it’s officially about as dangerous as the interactive movie Night Trap, which caused a similar fuss over nothing in the 1990s.
We’re at a point in gaming history where we’ve seen everything from GTA to Carmageddon to Hooligans: Storm Over Europe to JFK Reloaded to three Postal games to Super Columbine Massacre RPG ... so a potty-mouthed guy in a trenchcoat deciding to play Human Robotron isn’t so much shocking as endearingly quaint.
No matter how hard it tries, how stabby it gets, playing it begs only one question: is this all you’ve got? And it is. Hatred is just a twin-stick shooter; no more, no less. Actually, a lot less. There’s no wit and no weight. That’s not simply a sniffy knee-jerk dismissal based on the theme.
For those lucky enough to have missed the scandal, Hatred is about a really angy guy who wants to take revenge on humanity by shooting as many passers by and cops as possible.
Plenty of excellent games have taken us into this territory before, but the charms of, say, Syndicate and GTA have always had little to do with their missions, and more to do with their sly, knowing humour. Carmageddon and Quarantine were hilarious in their splattery cruelty. I’ll even make a case for the start of Postal 2, a mostly rancid game, but one with some good ideas, such as the way early violence actually is a choice - there’s nothing stopping you obeying the rules and standing in a boring queue to buy milk if you choose. (That doesn’t last, but while it does, it’s a clever conceit.) Virtual murder can be fun and cathartic, with no convincing evidence that it contributes any more to real-world violence than getting too many squiggly Tetris pieces.
Here, whether we set aside moral qualms or not, gunning down civilians in their hundreds has all the heft of popping bubblewrap, minus any of the raw satisfaction. Hatred has nothing to say and no emotional core beyond the angsty nihilism of a fourteen-year-old boy sick of being asked to take out the rubbish bins.
At the very least it could have been a vaguely enjoyable shooter. It’s not. The action alternates between crushing boredom and tooth-grinding irritation, and it’s not helped by the mostly monochrome Sin City-style visuals that look punchy in isolated shots but really don’t work as the bullets fly.
Areas are often pitch black, with characters and objects regularly lost in shadow. You’re playing a gangly guy with long black hair, wearing a long black coat. Even with the ability to highlight items/enemies in red, you spend much of your time squinting and stumbling around scenery like a murderous Mr Magoo.
As a shooter, it’s weak. Bugs are as numerous as the main character’s assault rifle rounds. Controls are floaty, fiddly and frequently unresponsive, with death often coming from off screen or seemingly at random - there was a particularly notable moment when an entire gas station just spontaneously combusted.
At least it’s a short game, though a surprisingly tough one, largely thanks to our villain protagonist having made the poor life decision to go about his rampage in a city where 80 per cent of the population are cops and much of the rest openly pack heat.
He also soon proves to have been surprisingly cheap when it comes to buying body armour and ammo. Tsk. Spree killers these days. Amateurs. Did all those murder simulators back in the 90s teach us nothing? The result is this odd hybrid where you can’t simply cut loose, but the mechanics offer nothing for more tactical play - proper cover, for instance, or any illusion that the AI is playing fair in hunting you.
It’s almost adorable seeing the furious shadows of confused enemies clustering on other floors of buildings - so close, yet so far. But that’s really it. It’s such an empty, forgettable game that even by the midpoint of the first level its assault on decency becomes little but a list of irritating sins against enjoyable twin-stick shooters. At least in that, it can get a murderous rage flowing through frustration. Perhaps that counts as a win of sorts?
The simple fact is that Hatred isn’t worth hating, or even getting slightly irked by. It is a game destined to be quickly forgotten - a bland monochrome rehash of another title that made only a glancing impact on the world almost two decades ago (Postal, 1997).
At its worst, it’s the gaming equivalent of a drunkard shouting abuse from a park bench. At its best ... well, the drunkard has leapt up and now he’s wielding a plastic knife. Rage against political correctness if you like, but don’t support this tired game as part of your ideology - there are so many better uses of your spare time. Hatred isn’t so much a game you uninstall from your PC as a naughty boy that you wearily send to bed without his supper.
Destructive Creations; PC
Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2015
