I didn’t
know much about Matt Hazard before
purchasing it. I’ve got into this habit of looking at games in shops and
looking up the achievements online before deciding whether or not to buy them. Matt Hazard was not advertised as
difficult but I didn’t look further than the fact that they were all offline
achievements. I saw this as meaning an easy game and it will be the last time I
use that as a measure!
The game
follows the story of Matt Hazard, a video game ‘star’ from the 80s who is about
to make his comeback and I’m not speaking metaphorically. He is a game
character making his comeback. The story is the best part of the game which is
something of a rarity for shooting games.
You have to
take Matt through several levels of bad guys as the owner of the company that
makes the Matt Hazard games tries to
kill him. I mean, in the game ‘kill him’ so it’s not like he will actually die
but I found the whole breaking-the-fourth-wall aspect incredibly funny.
Especially the way that Matt interacts with Sting Sniperscope, the guy who is
meant to be replacing Matt. He constantly mocks him and in generic computer
game script, Sting can’t quite deal with it.
Another gem
from the in game dialogue occurs in level six when Matt has a face-off with a
bad guy from a fake JRPG game from before voice actors and has to physically
scroll through dialogue boxes. When he asks to talk the JRPG out of fighting,
he responds with ‘...’ which causes Matt to go a tirade about the use of
ellipses and how much of a gamer’s time is wasted scrolling through ellipses.’
Another
aspect that made me laugh is how many other games Hazard pokes fun at. As
mentioned above there is a general pop at JRPGs but there is also mockery for World of Warcraft, (Bill the Wizard)
James Bond (Kitty Abundanza – who also highlights that everyone loves Bond even
though he continuously cheats on women), Halo (Master Chef) and the surely
copyright infringing Captain Carpenter (who is Mario in a blue costume and is a
carpenter instead of a plumber).
In addition
to the storyline, the sound, inclusive of in-game music and voices, are really
well done. The music is very fitting to what’s going on in the game and has a
very catchy ‘success’ theme. Matt himself is voiced by Will Arnett and Wally
Wellesley is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris and it is amazing how much extra
credibility the characters have because of this. It actually feels like they
care about the characters and invest in them.
Visually the
game is below par, but that could also be to do with the parody from the story.
And it is in keeping with what the game is trying to do.
However, no
matter how much parody you introduce, at the end of the day a game is still a
game and it is there to be played. If you are going to execute the above stuff
really well then please, please get the gameplay right.
Matt Hazard is a cover based over-the-shoulder
shooter and the major problem with this is that Matt constantly gets in the way of enemies,
preventing me from seeing or aiming at bad guys until it’s too late. This is
annoying but not as annoying when I try to take cover and prevent myself from
being shot, Matt will just casually strafe to the right. All the time. Into the
line of fire, mid-reload without a sense of self preservation and then shout at
me like it’s my fault! This is one of the worst kinds of game bugs out there
and it sure as hell isn’t my controller either (testing carried out).
Also the
over the shoulder camera means that the shooting becomes based more on luck than
skill. First person would have been much better. The amount of times I was
killed with one shot while in cover was ridiculous towards the end. Other
criticisms include a limited variety of bad guys, and the fact there are only
eight levels, however towards the end of my playing of the game I was grateful
for both of these.
Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50
Achievements
Generally
speaking most of the achievements can be earned during a single playthrough.
Without going out of my way, I managed to bag 36 of these on one playthrough.
You get four at once for completing the game; five if you do it on the higher
difficultly available from the start. This seems like they wanted to have fifty
achievements for the sake of it.
Other
achievements include getting 50 kills with the various weapons in the game. I
had two of these left over at the end and the only reason for this was the fact
that they are secret for some bizarre reason.
There are
two achievements for collecting 20 each of the in game power ups. This required
additional playthrough time as I didn’t see enough of them in one playthrough
to get twenty.
A few others
that I missed were bizarre scenario-specific achievements with varying degrees
of stupid. One of these was to kill all enemies in the butcher shop with
headshots. The scenario itself was straight forward but when you factor in the
fact that it is a secret achievement, it becomes stupid. Also in the same level
as the butcher’s shop you have to traverse a dance-floor area without killing any
of the dancers. This is also secret but the dancers can be killed by the
enemies who are trying to kill you, which puts the achievement into the
luck-based stupid pile.
The
achievement for destroying potted plants is repetitively stupid because you
need to destroy 30 of them and there are only seven throughout the entire game.
Luckily they are all in one place and they are at the beginning of a level but
still, making you replay the same minute of a level is stupid.
Another few stupid
ones are for killing a bandit from behind, destroying all the meat in the
butcher level (secret) and my personally stupid favourite, killing three
testers with one grenade. This is a special one because there are only two
points in the final level of the game where three testers will appear at once.
And only once in a blue moon will they appear in a place where they can all be
killed with the same grenade. This is also at the end of the level which makes the
preparation for trying very tiresome and just slightly inconvenient.
And lastly,
completing a shitty game (in the area of gameplay) TWICE because you can’t play
it through on the hardest difficultly from the start is totally fucking stupid.
Several people have said that you can use a code to unlock the hardest
difficulty level from the start but I didn’t find this out until after completing
my first playthrough.
Downloadable Content – N/A
When you
factor in the above gameplay complaints with playing the game on the hardest
difficulty, (for a second time) it becomes a monotonous chore where I found
that my survival was more dependent on luck than my skill at aiming without
being able to see my targets. I certainly will not be touching or even going
near the game again, which is a real shame when you consider the amount of
effort they put into the story and characters.
I didn’t
mention this above because it was low on my list of annoyances but the
cut-scenes aren’t skippable either which is extra stupid on a second
playthrough. The level of the story almost made me forget this though which is
a testament to how good I thought it was.
