Hatred Review

There’s always some trepidation when it comes to reviewing something that has been riding the hype train for a while. Especially when it’s something that has polarised the public as much as Hatred. It’s tricky not getting caught up in the hype yourself be it positive or negative. so I approached this game unbiased, letting the dice fall as they may.

That being said... this game is BAD. Support for AMD CPU based systems is horribly broken to the point of crashing so successfully it kills Windows when the sound manager breaks (or at least, that’s what happens to me every time I try to play it). Performance on AMD systems is woefully below that of Intel and nVidia rigs and the developers admit that it’s their problem. I have yet to manage to play this abomination for more than 30 minutes at a stretch before the sound locks up, the screen goes red and it crashes taking Windows with it in a digital murder-suicide pact

Putting all that aside, the game itself is a banal suicide-by-cop simulator with a protagonist that really appears to have needed more hugs as a child. His whole “I hate the world, I hate everyone in it, I just want to die violently” shtick is one dimensional trash that belongs in bad teenage poetry of the kind Henry Rollins found risible on his “Talking from the Box” tour.

It’s a shameful thing to say, but that’s it for this game. Yes, visually it has a vaguely Sin City-ish aesthetic going for it through splashes of colour depicting things you can shoot to blow up and / or blood, but there is no more depth to it than that. You start in your basement where the game attempts to explain the controls and mechanics to you ending in executing some poor sap you had chained up in a locked room. At this point it is explained that executions are the only way to heal in this game.

Once you manage to wrestle the controls into some kind of order, which is no easy feat when like me you are using mouse and keyboard. It may be less of a trial on controller, but not having one I am unable to comment. You make your way upstairs and onto the street. Here you shoot anything that isn’t you, while making the kind of quips that belong in a 1980s straight-to-video slasher flick. An example of this “humour” is the antagonist saying “ah, the first of the human shields” when the police turn up. Oh how my sides ached as I laughed at this… really.

From this point on all you do is shoot civilians, walking up to them and if they are alive hitting Q to execute them to gain health and making more of them die until the cops show up, eventually taking you down in what would no doubt be a headline news story. The authorities gain in strength the longer you rampage about for, but the odds of you ever seeing anything more than normal patrol officers is miniscule thanks to the terrible A.I, pathing, controls and general awfulness of this game. I once got caught in a crossfire in some poor sap’s living room because navigating the terrible obstacle that is “half a burning sofa” proved too much for the antagonist to manage.

In summary, it’s what I said in the teaser for this review, a “suicide-by-cop simulator” of the same level as the abominable Ethnic Cleaning. No doubt some would say it is a cathartic release that some in society will find of use, some will blame the ills of the world on it at some point (I’m looking at you red topped tabloid newspapers), I however will only give you my opinion of this game and leave it to you, the reader to make your own decision. Try it if you must, Steam does have a refund policy now after all.