Splatoon
You know that powerful feeling you get, burning deep down, eating away at you. We all feel it, we all know it, we all get motivated by it. I’m talking of course about hatred.
But Lets talk about the videogame “Hatred“
Developed by a small Polish team, it has been released to Steam just a few days ago. I have been following its progress ever since the first trailer stirred up a huge heap of Controversy back in 2014.
Violence is an abundance in videogames nowadays, titles like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat have reached mainstream success and are accepted world wide as harmless fun.
Then this little game comes along, and causes an uproar due to its violent nature. How is this possible you may ask?
Cause of context. Instead of trying to justify the homicide, this title embraces the spirit of a psychopath-terrorist-shooter and outright demands you to kill and mutilate the innocent.
Rather than doing that tongue and cheek as a harmless joke it remains straight faced and absolutely mean spirited till the very end.
Now a lot of people have been asking me what I personally think of it, and now that I have played it through till the end on the “Extreme” difficulty setting, I can give you that opinion.
I’m going to say right off the bat that I had a lot of fun playing through the game, albeit a very short experience (5-7 hours depending on how much you die) the killing and slaughtering of the masses remains fun and challenging while appealing to my sadistic nature.
A good control system, highly customizable to my liking, made it very accessible to get into.
The visuals are very stylish, not to mention quite well done on a technical level for such a small team. It has cool looking destruction, some fantastic looking explosions and other great effects. While the whole game is in a gritty black and white, the police lights, blood, fire and other visual flares are in color, giving it that “Sin City” style. Which I personally find quite appealing.
Lots of cold dark black, make the presentation fittingly somber to embrace the sinister theme. From the flaming skulls in the pause menu right down to the customizable “Skull” cross-hair, the game really roles with the aesthetics of hate. All under-toned by a nicely haunting ambient soundtrack, guaranteed to make you feel uncomfortable.
The voice acting is also pretty solid, however the main protagonist, or should I say “antagonist” sounds like a caricature of the school shooter stereotype which makes the game very comedic. I’m not sure if that was intentional or not, but some of the one liners and monologues are so juvenile that I’m guessing they knew what they were doing.
Slitting a woman’s throat while saying “you reek of weakness you cunt!” is so straight forward, that its funny in a dark fucked up sort of way. While burning down an entire party, only to comment with “Birds of a Feather, Die Together!” is like something a child would wright on his math book, thinking hes a badass bastard.
Even the game-play makes sure to embrace the hate! The health system cleverly makes sure to go out of its way to be sadistic, cause the only way to get your health back, is to wound someone and brutally execute them while they are whimpering in agony. Cause of that you end up running away from fights
just to desperately look for innocent pedestrians so you can “feed” yourself back to health from the antagonists sadistic gratification. The game even says “Youre not a hero, don’t hesitate to run from battles and regain your strength.”
But even though it controls well, there are many problems with Hatred. Sound and visual glitches, weird collisions with walls and objects, horrible vehicle physics that make it an absolute chore to drive any vehicle are just some of them.
When you face masses of enemies that fight back and you try to melee them or shoot em up close there can be some very clumsy behavior, not to mention absolutely horrible AI. The executions are very clumsily “executed” as-well making the game behave weirdly, like people running into you or awkwardly aiming a gun at your head waiting till the victim is finished off.
Another massive problem I have with the game is that once you beat it, there’s nothing else to do, there are no extra modes to make you want to go on another killing spree, its just over, and all that there’s left to do is try and get some of the achievments you may have missed, which I personally never cared about in any games.
If you compare Hatred to other titles that allow you to go on killing sprees, such as GTA 5, Postal 2 or Prototype, Hatred feels very limited in the ways you can go about it. However I got to take in consideration that those games were all done by bigger studios which had more experience making games.
While Hatred was exactly what I thought it would be, it didn’t let me down in that aspect. But its not a game I could recommend to anybody looking for a solid title to sink a lot of time into.
Clumsy, shallow, short, yet fun and delightfully dark. A modern, more sinister Postal.
If I look at it as an art piece conveying the emotion “Hatred” I would give it an A plus, cause it is by far the most mean spirited, darkest video game I have ever played. The hate its getting from gamers, critics and other groups alike proves my point. An art piece titled “Hatred” should get alot of hate or else its doing something wrong.
As a video-game however, its barely average, a short title with no replay value, shallow gameplay and many clumsy unpolished technical hiccups.
I personally love this title for what it is, and hope it raises the bar for what can be tolerated by the media in videogames while inspiring more developers to make you play as an absolute bastard.
Underdog titles like Hatred must be supported!
Lets see what else Destructive Creations has in store for the future.
Let me know how your Genocide crusade went, in case you played it for yourself.
Stay Angry
-Shad
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