Today we are going to take a look at Hinterhalt 2. This first-person shooter with cartoony graphics promises tons of fun and excitement in huge battles taking place in World War II. Whether it can deliver on these promises is the question will try to answer today. Hinterhalt 2 is available on Steam for 8 Euros and 19 cents or your regional equivalent.

With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

• Be also sure to check out my other posts and follow me @kralizec and subscribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube Channel

Buy the game here - But please don't buy it.

Video Review

Text Review

I’ll be honest with you guys. I haven’t played a first-person shooter probably since I’ve played the last DOOM. And that was one hell of a great first-person shooter. But I’ll try to be as objective as I can be nonetheless.

Gameplay

So as we do always we will start the review by taking a look at the mechanics of the game. And this will be a fairly easy job here in Hinterhalt 2 as this is a very simple game at its core. The developer decided to go with the most bare bones of a shooter I have seen in a long time. Thus what you have at your disposal is shooting and running. Not even crouching is implemented in this game.

And because we really don’t have to talk about the tools that you get to deal with enemies let’s talk more in depth about how the two main mechanics you have work. And I don’t think we have to talk about running that much honestly. It’s just slightly faster movement speed compared to walking. And when I say slightly, I mean slightly.

Instead, let's take some time to talk about the shooting. Which is freaking awful. All the weapons are inaccurate as hell and thus hitting something that is further than 3 steps from you is a matter of luck rather than a matter of skill. Probably most impressively, firing weapons from your hip is more accurate than firing them when aiming. That makes zero sense and makes long-range weapons like the sniper rifle close to useless. But firing from your hip has its own problem. The little circle that tells you where you are aiming is close to invisible. Thus instead of focusing on where enemies are and if you have to take cover half of the time – if not more – you will be searching your screen for the tiny little gray and almost invisible circle so you know in which direction you are actually shooting.

Right now, you’re probably thinking “man, that sounds pretty bad” but you know what? That’s not even the worst part. This is then combined with god-awful spawning. There were myriads of times when I spawned in right in the middle of a group of enemies just to be killed without even getting a chance to get out.

I guess I mentioned your enemies so let's talk about the AI for a second. It’s just as bloody awful as the shooting experience is. And it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about enemy AI or the AI of the bots on your team. Both are awful and honestly, I don’t know which one was pissing me off more.

The enemy AI seems to have aim-bots active as they are capable of hitting your from across the map with the same exact weapons you use – and remember it would be hard to hit a barn with them even if you were standing inside of it. And for some reasons the devs have decided to give them reflexes that allow them to see you, aim at you and shoot within less than a second after you spawn. But apart from their apparent mastery of weapons that fire with more randomness included than your average lottery and reflexes that could be used to pilot spaceships through densely packed asteroid fields they are dumb. Dumb as hell. They just walk around, not taking cover or anything like that.

On the other hand, you have your “teammates”. Which lack their counterparts impressive aim and reflexes while retaining their dumbness in all other ways. So they work only as ammo fodder and it’s up to you to do the majority of the killing. Combine that with the fact that friendly fire exists in this abomination of the game and “friendlies” like to shoot straight through you, especially if you just happen to spawn right in front of them and you get one hell of a bad AI.

All of this leads to situations that can’t be even described by the words “not fun”. Not even boring or bad. This game is just unpleasant to play. You can be spawned into a map only to be killed by a bot that seen you and hit you from across the map or even better by your “ally” standing right behind you. And if by some miracle you survive the first 5 seconds and manage to get away from your “teammates” and take cover to orient yourself you can’t hit anything unless your standing right in front of it.

The last thing I need to talk about is how you differentiate between ally and foe. Because if you were to do it strictly based of how the different factions looks, you’d have no chance. Seriously 0 chance of guessing that. So instead there is this little square above the bots and it’s either red or yellow. And you might assume that red means its an enemy. But nooo… that’s not fully true. That’s true only if the enemy is part of the Axis – that means Germans or Japanese. The Allies get the yellow dot. So if you play for the first time as one of the allies you’ll assume that red means enemy and when you try playing as the other side you’ll start shooting your allies. What the heck? Who came up with this?

Okay… so those are the mechanics and I don’t think I need to reiterate that they are bad. But… that’s still not all that is bad with the game. Nooooo, sir. We need to talk about the … well… false advertising the game pretty much does. Let's talk about the modes available.

And this time I’ll start with the “best one”. The zombie mode. This is the only playable mode in the game and it's exactly what you’d assume just more boring than in other games. You can spawn in and battle increasingly larger groups of zombies. But the zombies are always the same and they just run directly at you and you shoot them. Assuming you don’t get shot by your friendlies at the very start of the game. It’s actually easier to kill the zombies when all your teammates died rather than when they are in the game. But nonetheless, this mode is at least playable. It’s not great, just not a total disaster.

And then we have the skirmish and campaign modes. Which are exactly the same thing – just in the skirmish mode you get to choose your map and the side you’ll be playing as. Otherwise, it's just a mode where there is a limited amount of respawn tickets for both teams and the one that manages to kill the other team faster wins. But… Killing an AI controlled character removes one ticket while if you get killed it removes 5 tickets. Remember, you're getting killed within 5 seconds after respawning and it happens very often and even worse – often many times in a row. This puts whatever team you’re playing for at an insane disadvantage.

But that is still not the part I would label as false advertising. That is the campaign mode itself. It’s not a campaign mode. There is no story included. There no objectives. It’s just the skirmish mode with a little tiny cinematic at the beginning of each battle. That is not a campaign mode! Seriously!

Soo… Hinterhalt 2 is awful mechanically. None of the mechanics make sense or are fun. I really don’t have much more to say about the game mechanically. So let’s move on to the superficial parts of this abomination.

Graphics

And we’re going to start with the graphics. And I’ll be at honest here. The graphics are fairly good. The style was actually what drew me to this … game…

It’s cartoony style that I think could work very well for a shooter as it allows for lots of bright colors that allow you to not get confused. But sadly, as I said already before – Hinterhalt 2 totally screws that up as well. But again, the style itself is actually nice. Just used in a game that doesn’t deserve it.

Music

Next up is the music. Well, it would be next up on the list if there was any to music to speak about. So… nope.

Performance

Surprisingly enough, in terms of the performance, Hinterhalt 2 actually ran well. It didn’t experience any frame drops or crashes. So there’s at least that.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: Hinterhalt 2 is awful. Don’t buy this. The shooting is horrific. The AI is terrible. You get randomly spawned into groups of enemies that shoot you within 0.01 seconds. The modes are boring and there truly isn’t a single redeemable fact about this game. It’s just not a fun game to play. Honestly, if this were like a high-schoolers project I would give him praise for making something that with a lot of work could be made into something decent. But the developers decided to charge money for this. And that, that was their mistake. Don’t spend your money on this. Buy a good shooter and not this crap.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page