Hey Nerds! You strapped for cash but still want to play a good cover based shooter? Well download and enlist onto Hazard Ops, a free to play, MMO 3rd person shooter, where you can play PvE missions and PvP for those who want to pay to win (unfortunately).
I raved about this game when it was released, but the lack of a decent anti cheat system being implemented put a whole bunch of you off from downloading this game. But – there is good news, PvE is a real blast. In the PvE type missions, you work in co-operation with other people from around the world to accomplish your goals, whether it is to take down a PMC set up in hostile territory, and the main objective is to take out Metal Gear a mechanical, walking tank. Or you can play a wave based survival mode against the AI, who can be zombies, terrorists, mummies, monsters, anything really.
Hazard Ops is a very cool game, that can give you and your friends hours of fun co-operative gameplay, and you don’t have to spend a penny, unless you want to get good at PvP, in which you have to make in game transactions to gain boosters for your character, better armor and weapons, and don’t forget to switch your aim bot on since the game doesn’t actually kick you for cheating yet (seriously).
The simplest way to do describe this game is to say it’s a Gears of War rip off that you can play free of charge on Steam. It’s a great but has some elements that do annoy the crap out of me, such as timed power-ups that when unlocked they stay with you for several hours but then are lost if you don’t purchase them when the time runs out, but the game gives you enough to work with if you are like me and just play for the PvE. If you were trying to play this game competitively in PvP however, you really need to spend some cash on certain weapons and items to get by, otherwise you find yourself being fragged by more experienced players on a regular basis.
There are actually a range of different game modes, such as Team deathmatch, Mercs vs Monsters which offers a variety of different experiences, where teams of players are required to work together to win effectively.
There isn’t a great deal I can say about it in just words, you have to watch the trailer to decide for yourself whether its worth the time, and if you fancy yourself a casual gamer, it’s probably not worth the time, since the timed bonuses really require you to play this game a lot.
Hazard Ops is only available in Europe, and for some reason the US got a different game entirely, called “Zombies Monsters Robots”, which is fundamentally the same game, but with more emphasis on the pay to win micro transaction structure that takes place in free to play games these days. I’m not entirely sure what the issue was with the name having to change, but ZMP wasn’t received as well as Hazard Ops upon launch, and isn’t updated nearly as regularly as it’s European counterpart. I don’t really understand as to why the publishers felt that the game needed to be released separately but maybe it came to money, like most business decisions do. The confusion for me starts with the name, why change the name? ZMP/Zombies Monsters Robots does have that cool abbreviation you can use, whilst Hazard Ops sounds pretty generic. You know, it’s really one of those things that pisses me off to no end, titles being changed. We’ve had that problem with movies in the past, you’d have thought that the current generation that work within the industry would have been educated on this. What happens when they decide to make a sequel? Will it be Hazard Ops 2? Zombies Monsters Robots 2? Or will it be an international clusterf**k where Europe gets “Hazard Ops 2: ZMP” and the US gets “ZMP 2: Hazard Ops”. How about if the title changes to Zombies Monster Robots in the EU, where the US get just Hazard Ops. It could go a number of ways, all of which would be terrible and I really can’t bear the thought of yet another mess up of titles. Remember what happened to Halloween? Friday the 13th? Nightmare on Elm Street? Zombie? Hell, I could do a whole rant about titles and how they piss me off, and don’t even get me started with the Legend of Zelda, that franchise just knows how to piss you off when it comes to titles, even though the games are awesome…you know what, it might not be a bad idea to cover this at some point, so – Keep an eye out for that I guess, but for now – Hazard Ops, is a good free to play game, it has some issues that stop it being great, but for no cost, it’s pretty darn good.
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