Hatred is perfect fodder for “What other people think I do/What my parents think I do” memes--memes that would include tiny boxes for “What the media thinks Hatred is,” “What 14-year-olds think Hatred is,” “What the developers think Hatred is,” and so forth. But there's really only one box that matters, and that would be the one in the lower right: “What Hatred actually is.”

Here's what Hatred actually is: An isometric semi-open street-level shooter in which you kill designated numbers of progressively tougher adversaries before advancing to the next area. You have three main weapons--which you aim with an analog stick on your gamepad--as well as grenades, and the ability to duck. The basics are not terribly dissimilar from the first top-down iterations of --and it might have been funny if the rest of the game's particulars weren't a semi-monthly real-life tragedy.

But there’s an even greater irony at work here, in that having brutally killed thousands of innocents, survived police retaliation, and laid waste to everything good in the world, even while the Antagonist devours scenery behind the mic, you feel nothing. Hatred is too repetitive to be exciting, too dumb to be frightening, too basic for you to feel accomplished at its end, too dour to be violently cathartic, too self-serious to engender ironic amusement, and yet still too childish to matter. It will be given more credit than it’s worth--all a game like this can do is provide meager table scraps to a ravenous desire already deeply embedded in pre-existing monsters, and that's not a problem that treating Hatred as Videodrome made (new) flesh will cure. The fact that the final product fails even to be worth a primal psychotic scream of victory against society at large for the people it might encourage means it laughably fails even at being dangerous.

Meaning, essentially, it's a nothing of a game.