With the sour taste of last year’s Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, developer Vicious Cycle and D3 Publisher has come up redemption with the Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond for the PlayStation Network Store and Xbox Live Arcade, this review will be about the Xbox 360 version.
This follow up of Matt Hazard is a side scrolling shooter with our catch phrase saying hero Matt Hazard, the premise of the game is that Matt is a fictitious old time “8-bit” video game hero who has returned into the next gen platforms to do battle. The game play mechanics are pretty easy to get used to, besides shooting on a 2D platform, you occasionally have to shoot enemies that are coming from “the background”, but a quick click of the trigger will cause Matt to aim into the background and fire. You can also choose to lock your position and not move to shoot enemies; useful if you just can’t shoot that pesky enemy on a ledge without running toward him and getting shot yourself.
Just like with all side scrolling shooters, at the end of each level you will fight a big boss. While most are patterns you can memorize, some are harder than others to finish off with creative aiming into the background to kill it.
The weapons are quite creative, including the killer short range shot gun, spread gun and my favorite the rocket launcher. Enemies are varied and change costumes as you advance in the levels. When you start off in the cruise ship, you’ll be battling evil cruise ship staff in waiter outfits and shipmates. The pirate campaign is awesome with tons of pirates to blast away and really tough skeletons and so forth. There are 8 levels in total for you to blast your way through. Some of the levels might remind you of some games you may have played (underwater Bioshock, Mirror’s Edge, Super Mario and even Team Fortress 2), although due to copyright laws, you won’t see any enemies or characters from the games themselves!
Graphics are clean and good enough for a side scrolling 2D shooter on the Xbox 360, you will find some odd places where you’ll get stuck here and there, but that just means you’ll need to be better and jumping in general.
Matt Hazard has quite a mouth, and that is a good thing. He’ll be adding to the madness of wave after wave of enemies with funny catch phrases, he even pokes fun at last year’s “not so great” release that has ended up in the bargain bins in one of the cut scenes.
You do have limited continues and lives. You will get quite mad if you die at the big boss as there are no checkpoints in the game and it will force you to do the entire level again. So if you keep dying at a big boss at the end of a level, you might throw your controller at your TV because you have to do the entire level again.
There is no online play for two players which really makes this a bummer because it would had been such a great addition, you can only play 2 Players co-op offline on one Xbox 360.
When you finish Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond, be sure not to skip out of the credits, hint hint! For roughly $15 in Microsoft Xbox live Points, it is a fun distraction for about 2 and half hours. More fun is to be offline with co-op with a friend makes it worth while purchase.
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