Hatred

The title more or less spoils my point for the review, so let's just address the elephant in the room, first off. It should be be mentioned at some point, and it makes the rest of the review have more context.

Hatred is infamous for the publicity it received. Destructive Creations can get at least some credit here; they knew that bad publicity was better than none, and hyped up the controversy for this game very hard. It got lots of attention, good and bad, and lots of people eventually played it.

Here's the thing you need to know about Hatred; it's very boring and a step below average. The game does not play or handle all that well. At best, it's competent. What do I mean?

Well, when you start to mow down all those innocent civilians who are as sympathetic as wet cardboard, the authorities will arrive. Often, they will see you before you see them, and shoot you off-screen. This makes accomplishing anything pretty difficult, and leads to you soaking up more bullets before you can figure out what happens. And if you die, you restart the level, unless you do sidequests which give you limited respawn points (seriously, what?).

So okay, it's challenging. Challenging in a mostly artificial way, but still, challenges are good, right?

You'll find out that the difficulty curve for this game goes up very quickly and doesn't really relent for the player. The way the view works, the perspective makes it hard to shoot things, like people or cops or objects, and you end up struggling to get through a level with any sense of real accomplishment.

Same goes for the executions. If you execute someone, the camera view changes to a closeup of the execution and you magically regain health. The first few times you see this, it's almost shocking, but then you have to do it so much to regain health (that quickly goes away by those pesky authorities that are oh so good at hitting you) and the variety of executions are not that much that it makes the entire thing boring. Any emotion they once had turns into, before the second goddamn level ends, apathy.

Ditto for the driving, which is absolute garbage to control. Never once did I drive a vehicle in this game and enjoy it, often trying to battle the gameplay more than anyone else. It's this kind of thing that makes Hatred really hard to get behind, because it just ultimately isn't fun. The most gratifying it ever really gets are the rare moments when you can destroy the environment and kill people in a way that isn't "shooting", and you can be mistaken for thinking the game is fun!

There are at least some positives, however, and it would be silly not to bring them up. Although the aesthetics and color design do wear thin after a while, the black/white/grey palette mixed in with occasional colors is surprisingly remarkable and effective, making the very rare moments the game manages to strike a chord all the more effective. That being said, it doesn't make for any particularly dynamic moments itself and ensures that levels feel same-y, but on the whole it is so much more effective than if the game was in full color. The drab music won't really have me remembering it or giving it any personal accolades, but it matches with the art design to an extent as well.

And like I said above, the game does try to encourage you to at least take different approaches in murdering people. The weapons you get aren't novel, true, but the environment is a bit more malleable in your approach to confronting enemies than it first appears to be. Some explosives can really bring out the fun in blowing stuff up and setting things on fire, and sometimes the levels are designed in a way that almost begs you to fuck with it just to see lots of people die.

There's one major aspect of the game that I touched on that really kills it: it's all flat, emotionally. You're desensitized to the violence before the first level really ends, the mood and tone of the game plateaus in the first five minutes and starts and ends at "murderdeath", and aside from cheesy lines from the Antagonist, everyone is boring as shit. That's what really makes this game hard to sell. The Antagonist is hardly memorable, and the people you kill have no involvement in the world beyond targets. You can't sympathize with them to any degree, nor can you laugh at them enough to feel justified in killing them, nor do you feel literally anything to elicit emotions. While I'm not fond of the game myself, at least Postal² did enough to make you feel something out of killing people, and everyone, civilians and authorities and "main characters" otherwise are a few steps below the Grand Theft Auto series in terms of impact. That franchise always did a good job at feeling alive and making the player give a shit; this makes me feel like I'm at a target range.

So on the whole, the game is just somewhat below-average, and it legitimately feels like Destructive Creations knew this and understood it. The marketing for the game and the ensuing controversy never really focused on the game itself or any of its features beyond killing people. It really just did a good job at covering up the fact that, when you get into the game, it's boring as shit and there's no involvement to be had at all. There's nothing for this game to give the player, and the most memorable thing about it is how mad people got over it prior to its release (and I won't lie and say that I was free of that pitfall too; I got suckered into it). This game has nothing of note, and surely the developers must have known that too.

It surely can't be fair for me to knock this game on its marketing when nearly all games lie with their marketing, or deceive the player. But I feel like the deception here is more than just lying about features or looks; it actively distracted people from how good or bad the game would be to how "edgy" it is, and it feels entirely like a level below any other deception. It deceived the public into hearing about the game and getting mad, so people could buy the game and drive up the sales, before realizing that in the end, the game is little more than a more sterile and boring version of GTA and Postal. That's perhaps the most damning part; it's easier to remember how the game got marketed than the game itself. For any other game release, that'd be seen as business as usual. For Hatred, its the biggest flaw of all.