Raze’s Hell (Xbox)
It seems that as children grow older, there is often a violent rejection of the things they enjoyed as a child. Singing songs about killing Barney the Dinosaur could just be part of coming to grips with their budding maturity, but even in adulthood there’s often some appeal to seeing something traditionally childish clash with something much darker. Raze’s Hell, a game about brutally killing what look like the smaller cousins of the Teletubbies, seems like its playing into the dark fantasies of destroying what we loved in our youth, but surprisingly, there’s a bit more to the concept than it first lets on.
Upon opening the pages of a storybook, the player is told of a land called Kewtopia where everyone is adorable and happy, ruled by the most beautiful member of their society, The Princess. One day, The Princess makes a declaration that the Kewlett people should go out and share their cuteness with everyone, sending them out to beautify the dark and dreary world and spread their way of life to other species. However, despite their technicolor utopia of happiness and smiles, the truth of Kewtopia is despite their push for aesthetic cuteness, their society is rotten and unhappy. To spread their “love” to their world, they take up violent arms and kill any who don’t fit their standards of beauty, enslaving others who are put to work on achieving The Princess’s secret reason for waging the war on ugliness. Meanwhile, any loss in this war they suffer is painted on their news station as industrial accidents to hide the ugly truth and push the byline that everything in Kewtopia is a-okay, only for the newscasters to threaten and insult each other the moments the cameras go off. The world of Raze’s Hell actually seems to be satirizing things like the media, colonialism, and the pursuit of beauty, all in a game that is still definitely hoping to appeal to people with its bloody and destructive play.
Most of the game’s plot will cut away to scenes of The Princess or Kewtopia to work on building its parodic message, but the action of the game focuses on Raze, a member of one of the ugly races that the Kewletts hope to wipe out in their campaign. Raze flees as his village is destroyed and his people shot to death, stumbling across an artifact in the process that grants him the power he needs to get revenge on the people who ruined his life. Raze doesn’t really have any personality out of his single-minded focus on revenge though, not even talking at all over the course of the game, but carrying the weight of directing him towards important plot events and speaking with other characters is a flying creature called Slivh. Slivh will guide Raze through the world to foil the Kewletts, The Princess’s secret mission, and eventually take the battle to Kewtopia, but it’s a road with many battles on the way, Raze’s adorable foes actually proving to be rather competent soldiers.
A single Kewlett is usually a pretty good shot, able to hit Raze well if he’s not moving or behind cover. Still, most of them go down in a few shots and aren’t too much to worry about on their own, but they’re rarely ever alone. The Kewlett forces rely on heavy numbers and smart positioning, the many gunfights in Raze’s Hell mixing up their battlefield design to give them unique identities and make your foes legitimate threats that must be handled intelligently. Low ranking enemies with their jack-in-the-box shaped automatic weapons can usually be handled pretty well, but they’ll often have back-up from things like powerful automated turrets, bomb-throwing bears, snipers, and rocket-firing foes that mean you’ll often have to prioritize targets to make sure you aren’t taken down while dealing with the regular infantry. There are plenty of unique concerns in a battle too that you might not first be aware of, things like explosive teddy bears charging you and powerful cyborg Kewletts riding rainbows down onto battlefield that can suddenly get the drop on you. Gas grenades can throw off Raze’s aim if they hit him, paint can block his vision, and flying machines can rain gunfire on you from above. Even if you are doing well in a gunfight, it is likely you will be hit, as the enemy layouts are designed to be quite challenging. However, you’ve got a few options to make weathering their assaults easier. Raze has a rolling move that can quickly get him from place to place and help him avoid a lot of gunfire in the process, but more important to his continued survival is the way he heals. Once you’ve killed an organic enemy, their body bursts into bloody chunks that Raze can absorb to replenish his health. While the game gives you audio and visual cues for many of its more dangerous foes like the cyborg Kewletts, these survival options help patch over the cases where you can find yourself in a very dangerous situation because you left yourself a little too open.
Raze’s weapons are of course going to be incredibly important for dealing with his foes, and the game has a surprisingly good bunch on offer. Presented as biological bullets, Raze breaks the nests of creatures called Squibs to use different ammo types in combat. Admittedly, many of the Squibs have some real-life weapon analogue, but not all of them are so straightforward. The most reliable Squib will be the Ripper, a machine gun weapon that is often provided the most ammo of all your weapons, even serving as one of the few default weapons you receive when your weapon arsenal is reset at the start of a new mission. The Spiker is a bit more unique, it being a charge weapon that fires a powerful straight shot that serves as your initial power option, but you’ll soon get your explosive Blaster shot, the shotgun-like Smasher, and the sniping option with the Driller. Things get more imaginative from there, with the Bloater instantly defeating weaker foes by inflating them like balloons, the Lurker letting you control a spider-like explosive that can run behind cover to take out hiding enemies, and the Seeker being a homing shot you can guide around a little bit until it has found its target. The Igniter is probably the weakest of the ammo types though, the situational puddle of oil you can start on fire a bit hard to pull off when enemies are often smart enough to avoid the flames, but even then you can suck in the fire and breathe it on them for one of the strongest killing options in the game. As the game goes on ammo for all weapons begins to become harder to come by, so learning what weapons are best for a situation or enemy type becomes key in making sure you’re able to win a fight, even the odder ammunition options finding use since your reserves must be preserved. You do have a melee attack for when you run dry, although rushing in is certainly deadly unless the coast is clear. The stealth options in the game aren’t the best, Raze moving incredibly slow when sneaking so his instant kill melee strike is hard to execute and thus rarely useful. You can get some power-ups to help you out though, some of these being simple limited use ones like more damage output or health regeneration, but then there are game changers like stage-long infinite ammo for one of your weapons that allow the final stages to really crank up how many enemies they can get away with throwing at you.
The fight to take down The Princess and the Kewletts makes for a story mode filled with tense and difficult battles, but the checkpoints present accomodate the difficulty and you can bring a friend along to tackle the story cooperatively. Overcoming your enemies is made incredibly satisfying by the fact they put up such a strong fight though, so while things can be rough, the payoff for finally overcoming a strong enemy arrangement makes the battle both action-packed and filled with strategy. The story isn’t the only thing Raze’s Hell offers though, but its competitive multiplayer is sadly unavailable in split-screen, the dead online servers and the awkwardness of using Xbox system link making it hard to arrange a match to enjoy more of the excellent gunplay. There are extra modes of play available, perhaps the strangest and most interesting being… golf. Using a few of the ammo types from single-player, Raze must shoot a giant golf ball across large golf courses in either the normal golf mode or a mini-golf inspired version, and here shot types like the Seeker really find their footing in letting you set up different strengths and angles for your shots. It’s definitely a little unwieldy, but for a bit of fun, it certainly serves as a decent twist on the game’s mechanics. Stealth also gets its own mode where things are actually arranged to properly encouraged it, and Survival and Blood Rain just serve as places where your shooting ability against waves of enemies is really put to the test. None of these are so fully fleshed out that you’ll come back to them again and again, but they do reimagine the game in some interesting ways worth dabbling in.
THE VERDICT: Raze’s Hell is a curious creature. The bloody deaths of your adorable foes are definitely gratuitous, but these cute enemies are also a biting critique of politics and beauty standards. The gunplay has plenty of weapons that feel like reskins of shooter standbys, but the ammo distribution makes every part of your arsenal invaluable and the more unique sides of it allow for weapons that are a good fit for the enemy variety and positioning. The extra modes like golf are unusual and a bit awkward, but they reinterpret some solid mechanics into interesting new forms. Raze’s Hell is about the contrast between ugly bloody mayhem and cute colorful creatures, so perhaps it’s really not a surprise after all that unassuming design choices are enhanced to excellence through creative adjustments and solid design.
And so, I give Raze’s Hell for Xbox…
A GREAT rating. While certainly a difficult game, Raze’s Hell makes that appealing by deriving that difficulty from needing to manage an interesting set of weapons against a capable enemy force. Smart inclusions like the ease of healing allow for the player to make some of the inevitable mistakes, and being asked to be more intelligent about ammo use than just selecting what’s always strongest means that gunfights ask for smart play by punishing brazenness or sloppiness. Being a difficult shooter that puts up a fair fight already makes it more interesting than your typical fare, but the game makes its setting more interesting with its clear underlying messages. While blowing apart a cute critter might be satisfying to some, their corrupt society and disguised villainy makes them a more realistic enemy to enjoy taking down. A considerable amount of time is spent outside of Kewtopia though, so perhaps a bit more time behind enemy lines would make the game stronger in the long run, as would allowing for more opportunities to use stealth kills or other underplayed mechanics.
Raze’s Hell could have just been a dark rejection of all things cute and cuddly, but strong gameplay and a few messages about the nature of appearances makes it more than just what one might see on a surface level interpretation. Funnily enough, while some might dismiss it as an ugly fulfillment of violent fantasies, that only further plays into the game’s critique of striving for beauty and viewing things that aren’t beautiful as inferior or worthy of erasure. If you do look past the surface level though, Raze’s Hell has an excellent shooting game waiting to be experienced.