Hazard Ops Preview

Free-to-play - it’s the trend that’s taking the gaming industry by storm. With players flocking to MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2, MMOs like Star Wars: The Old Republic and shooters such as Planetside 2 and Team Fortress 2, it’s obvious that the model does work. Now it’s the turn of Hazard Ops - a third-person shooter from Berlin-based developers Infernum - to crack the market.

Seemingly taking inspiration in equal parts from Gears of War and Serious Sam, Hazard Ops offers a wide variety of things to shoot in the face; zombies, monsters, robots, mutants, mummies, demons and dinosaurs all act as target practice here. You can team up with other players to take on these creatures in the cooperative mode. Or, if you get bored of that, you can turn on your fellow players in the competitive multiplayer.

There are plenty of modes on offer to keep you entertained though.  On the co-op side there's Survival, Massive Survival, Extermination Ops, Assault, Massive Assault, Assault Ops, and other  unimaginatively named game types. That's just the cooperative side of things too; the versus side of Hazard Ops includes Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Elimination, BEAST, Defusion and King of the Hill.

Between all of these options there's a lot to keep you occupied. Before jumping into these though, you'll have to create a character. Your personal monster slayer can be customised in terms of gender, facial features, hair style, skin/hair colour, clothing and voice. This may sound like quite an extensive set of variables, but each category only has a small number of choices, meaning that most characters end up looking similar. Hopefully more options will be added before the full release to allow for more unique-looking avatars.

Most of the game types are fairly generic; Survival is very much in the CoD Zombies vein, including mystery weapon boxes, electrified traps, zombie dogs and so on - Massive Survival being the same but with more zombies. Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch and Capture the Flag are all what you'd expect, while other modes like Defusion, Assault and Extermination Ops have proper objectives, you'll still be mostly spending your time pumping bad guys full of lead.

Thankfully, the core gameplay mechanics are fun and polished meaning you're unlikely to get bored of the combat. As mentioned earlier, Hazard Ops takes inspiration from Gears of War; cover mechanics, active reload and executions all make an appearance here. Familiar though the gunplay may be, it's responsive and enjoyable enough to stay interesting, especially when you get in a match with helpful, like-minded individuals.

Running on Unreal, the game looks good too. Character models and environments are nicely detailed, and there's some decent visual variety to the enemies and maps available in the beta. At this point the UI needs a bit of work though. Menus are cluttered with way too many options, none of which are very easy to interpret. Also, logging into the client usually results in a bombardment of pop-ups telling you about various missions and events, which can be a bit overwhelming.

I didn’t delve much into the in-game purchases (which seem to consist of XP/Coin bonuses and unique weapons) as I generally refuse to buy into titles that reward money over skill. In the beta I was able to get by pretty well with just the basic weapons, but it remains to be seen if the final game will find the right balance with its microtransactions. So far, Hazard Ops is shaping up to be a great shooter; whether or not it will be a successful free-to-play game is another question entirely.