Hatred from the Polish developer Destructive Creations, has been the subject of pretty good media coverage a while back when it was taken away from Steam before being accepted again – it’s fair to say the game’s setting is peculiar to say the least: you are to incarnate a guy who’s decided to end his life by killing as many as he can before being shot down by the police. With so many shootings taking place in the US or the recent terrorists attacks in Paris, this may sound like very, very bad taste. Here’s the trailer below, and I would recommend you NOT to watch it if you are sensitive to graphic violence.

I, for one, do not really care about the controversy. It’s just going one little step beyond what most GTA players enjoy doing once in a while: going in a killing spree and seeing how long you can survive and escape the authorities. There really is not much of a difference, while Hatred makes it an explicit goal. And if you think killing folks in gruesome way was taking things too far, I’d probably want to remind you of Manhunt (from Rockstar, again) which went very far in that direction too, several years ago. Obviously such games (and movies focusing on serial killers and the like) are for mature audiences, so as long as you know what you get into, and if that’s your thing…

The port for Linux is on its way, and as part of the testers I gave it a go. I can’t talk about the performance since I tested it only on a higher end machine (GTX970), but at least it was no Cities:Skyline (where even high end systems seem to struggle to keep stable fps) and ran very well in all situations. I only played the first level so far, and the whole area is pretty dark (it starts at night, I believe) and everything is in black and white. While the whole game is 3D, it keeps a fixed top-down view to make it easier to see what’s happening around you. Apparently the game uses Unreal Engine 4 (which would make it one of the first few titles using UE4 on Linux) while Epic Games did not really want to be associated in any way with this game.

Shooting people is basically all you do – but you apparently have “quests” to complete before moving to the next level – the first level asks you to kill more than 50 civilians (!), and recommends to “clean up” the police precinct, crash in a party, etc… most people, when attacked, just run away as you would expect, but this is the US and you will get folks fighting back, too, armed with pistols and rifles. As for GTA, you can get hit several times without dying, so this is obviously not realistic and makes it rather easy to keep going on. You can get some health back by “executing” victims on the ground – and that’s the only way. Executions sometimes trigger cinematic sequences where you see the protagonist butcher the unfortunate victim. Once again, all of this may sound very repulsive, but as someone who plays Shadow of Mordor, when you sneak behind an ork and kill them from the back, it’s pretty much the same level of graphical violence you see on screen – Hatred did not invent anything.

You are not supposed to play with a controller at this stage, since aiming is made to use the mouse, but I nevertheless tried with the Steam Controller. It worked well enough, but aiming was really difficult when it came to switching from one side to its opposite in a short time, surrounded by police forces. It is best to tweak its settings to make it easier to aim.

And that’s about all there is to say right now. The port seems to be progressing well, there was an update with several fixes just yesterday, and I would not be too surprised if it is officially released within a month or so, unless something critical comes up. That would be a port to Linux within more or less half a year of its Windows release: pretty fast!

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