Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond Review for Xbox 360

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond Review for Xbox 360

A Less Hazardous Time?

Poor Matt Hazard. People never gave him a chance. He was scorned and reviled in last year’s Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a parody of action games that by most accounts was a miserable and derivative video game experience. D3 just wanted to introduce us to Matt’s world, where he had (fictitiously) lived through a rise and fall in popularity and importance marked by his (also fictitious) 25 year career as a video game protagonist. But, people weren’t having it. It didn’t matter that Eat Lead, Matt’s triumphant next-gen comeback (and first actual game appearance) poked fun at gaming’s worst clichés, or that hilarious Will Arnett provided his vocals. The game tanked, critically and commercially. Matt, we hardly knew ye.

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond screenshot

Now Hazard’s back, inexplicably and without a large chunk of the development budget Eat Lead was afforded. Blood Bath and Beyond, unlike Matt’s last outing, is a digitally distributed affair, a measure which was only enacted (I suspect) to help keep cost overhead down after the disastrous sales figures from the last game. Frankly, this method of appearance seems to be the way that Matt was always meant to be enjoyed, although had he not had a higher profile release to begin with, Blood Bath and Beyond would probably just end up being that much more obscure.

At any rate, everything about Hazard’s new adventure is telling of his newer, more modest financial standing. For starters, the game is now in 2D, and looks a fair bit like Shadow Complex or the PS2 classic Contra: Shattered Soldier at first glance. Matt himself is no longer voiced by Will Arnett, (Boo!) but by a Will Arnett sound-alike (and only for in-game quips and comments), and cutscenes have been replaced with text boxes. Even the character drawings are knock-offish, resembling a second or third-tier imitator of Shinkiro (the immensely talented Japanese artist/character designer of King of Fighters and Bionic Commando Rearmed fame). None of these drop offs in production values are missed by the dev team, and keeping in the spirit of Eat Lead, they prove a frequent source of Blood Bath and Beyond’s humor. Story segments between levels are literally a black screen, with Matt talking in text form to an employee of Marathon Megasoft, the fictitious company responsible for all of Matt’s old games, while in the company’s game server. At the beginning of the game Hazard even comments on the use of text boxes rather than big-name voice actors, to which the Marathon Megasoft employee tells Matt it’s because of budget cuts and bad reviews-Blood Bath and Beyond takes place in August 2009, six months after Eat Lead’s release.

This time around, Hazard’s nemesis is General Neutronov, a stereotypical Russian villain whose humorously broken English only adds to the game’s overall comic feel. Neutronov has escaped into the Marathon Megasoft game server and is planning to do away with Matt’s original 8-bit incarnation (which vaguely resembles NES Simon Belmont with a gun). Given Eat Lead’s penchant for exploiting video game clichés, it should come as no surprise that Blood Bath and Beyond has its fair share of parodies as well, mostly aping on contemporary games’ designs and aesthetics.

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond screenshot

The first level, “The Hate Boat,” is clearly making fun of BioShock, complete with wannabe Big Daddy enemies, and later in the game Matt winds up on the Canadian Marathon Megasoft server, which somehow looks exactly like a 2D Mirror’s Edge; among other games that are notably parodied are Portal, Team Fortress 2, Modern Warfare, New Super Mario Bros., and old-school side-scrollers like Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi, to name a few.

About halfway through the game, the code for the various games that these settings are supposed to come out of gets garbled, which results in game splicing like a Western-themed level mixing with modern artillery or fat Resistance-eyed Left 4 Dead-style vomiting penguins (don’t ask me) sharing the screen with normal soldiers and, uh, bats that look ripped from Castlevania (though they could just be regular bats). In any case, the aesthetic parody is pretty damn near constant, for whatever it’s worth, although the script itself will provide you with the most chuckles.

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond screenshot

The comparison I made to Contra is particularly apropos in regards to Blood Bath and Beyond’s gameplay and mechanics, which generally mirror Konami’s shooter series very closely. Matt’s normal weapon is a standard issue Contra-style gun, meaning you have to hit the attack button for every shot fired. There’s a slew of various weapon types in the game that Matt can pick up, ranging from the typical (machine guns and shotguns) to more exotic selections (laser cannons and pulse rifles).

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond screenshot

Hazard can also lob grenades, and each kill fills a “carnage meter” that, when full, temporarily gives you invincibility and upgraded weapon power. You’ll need to make full use of this, too, as Hazard’s enemy counts can quickly overwhelm if you’re not paying attention. Aside from the immediate 2D plane of action, enemies often pop up in the background, which can be targeted separately. Blood Bath and Beyond also allows for individually angled shots while anchored in place a la Shattered Soldier-another crucial skill to master.

Despite its design implications, however, Blood Bath and Beyond never reaches either the off-the-wall ridiculous insanity or the equally insurmountable difficulty that makes Contra such a standout series. Think of this one as Contra-lite, minus all the Japanese wackiness. This doesn’t make Blood Bath and Beyond a bad game, especially, just not one that’s as interesting or entertaining as it could have been.

The goofy, splattery violence is a nice touch, and the humor is genuinely funny in some places, particularly if you unlock some of the bonus game boxes that chronicle some of Hazard’s more questionable fictitious spin-offs (like kart racers or quiz shows). But, overall the humor in the game’s design seems to be distributed unevenly, and doesn’t affect the core shooting mechanics in any substantial way (unless you count shooting Mario-esque blocks a significant change to gameplay). If the game were a little cheaper, I wouldn’t be quite as hard on it, but given Blood Bath and Beyond’s $15 price point, just know that you’re getting something that, despite its humor, doesn’t raise the bar much higher than average. If you like Contra-style action, you may want to check it out. Otherwise, you might want to try asking D3 to drop the price to $10.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.5 Graphics
Hazard does well, even under the constraints of a far more modest budget. Nice lighting and particle effects. 4.5 Control
Plays almost identically to Contra. This is a good thing. 3.7 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The sound effects are fine, although the Will Arnett sound-alike often repeats himself. The music is either forgettable or will really annoy you. 3.7 Play Value
Blood Bath and Beyond is average fun while it lasts. The script and parodies are a reason to keep playing. The low-gravity sections at the end of the game are enjoyable, too. 3.6 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • Eight levels of 2D action.
  • Features background and foreground shooting.
  • 2-player co-op.
  • Online leaderboards.

  • To top