Matt Hazard: Blood Bath & Beyond: Review

Poor old Matt Hazard, He’s had a tough year. Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard didn’t exactly set the world alight. In fact it pretty much sunk without a trace (a fact that BB&B makes fun of).  Most average game characters would just shrink away and die, but not Matt Hazard!!

Blood Bath & Beyond sees a change of pace for our intrepid hero. This time round he’s dishing out the pain 2D style. Fast and Frantic, the bad guys just keep on coming! The idea of the game is to navigate Matt through 8 side scrolling levels, taking on a variety of bad guys along the way. At the end of each level awaits the dreaded ‘End of level boss’, which require various tactics to take out. It’s all very 90’s!

The controls are relatively straight forward, you use the left stick to move Matt left and right, while the right stick is used for directional aiming (you can also use L1 or R1 to stick Matt to the spot and rotate your gun). Armed with your trusty gun and a sackfull of grenades, the game guides you in the right direction as you slaughter countless bad guys. Along the way, you pick up different power-ups for your gun which changes the type of ammo to such things like rockets, shotgun and flamethrower (amongst others). This makes the action a bit more varied, and helps clear some of the tougher enemies. As you notch up the kills, your ‘Hazard Time’ meter fills up. Once filled you can activate it to give you a limited period of time where you become invincible and your gun goes in to supermode!!

A main part of the game is its humour. And like Eat Lead, it’s very much hit and miss. Some of jokes genuinely made me chuckle, but some just made me cringe! The game is very self referential, but sometimes to its own detriment! As and for the story….. We let’s not dwell on that too much! It basically involves you going from game to game trying to defeat your nemesis. All you need to worry about is pointing and shooting.

Visually, it isn’t too bad. Each level looks pretty and Vicious Cycle have done a good job of recreating the feel of the games it’s parodying. The game also seems to be able to handle itself when the screen suddenly fills up with enemies.

However, it’s the gameplay that let’s it down slightly. BB&B will no doubt be compared to last years excellent Shadow Complex (as I am about to do). Unfortunately instead of focusing on exploration and unlocking secret areas, BB&B is all about the shooting. This can get a little tedious after 8 levels. The game can also be a bit unforgiving; with so much going on on-screen it’s impossible not to get killed. Luckily you do get quite a few lives & continues to keep you going. I also found myself getting really annoyed with some of the jumps in the game, often needing military precision to make it across. It also has a Co-Op mode, which whiles it can be a bit fun, also makes things on screen even busier!

Another problem is the price. £9.99 on the PSN and 1200MS Points on the Xbox 360 is a bit steep and knocking a few quid of may have done it a few favours.

All in all BB&B isn’t a bad game and it does do justice to the side-scrolling games of old. It does have its moments and I believe Matt Hazard has found a better home on the PSN Store/XBLA than it had on the store shelves. If you enjoy the thrill of frantic gun action you will get a kick out of this, but don’t expect to still be playing it in a few months time.

Review By John Whitehouse