Haven: Call of the King: technically, it is marvelously ahead of its time; aesthetically, it is painfully of its time; mechanically, it is dreadfully behind its contemporaries.
Stuff just happens in this game. You platform, you shoot in third and first person, you do rail shooting, jey pack flying, speedboating, driving, and so on. Most of it feels fine, it feels much better than literal shovelware would. Despite the connected environments and lack of loading screens, pretty much everything you do feels completely out of context. After the opening cutscene there is no dialogue for two full levels. You have a narrative goal, but if it weren't for the fact that your current objective is always displayed on the pause screen, you would have no idea what your next logical step for achieving that goal could possibly be.
There's too much mechanical variety introduced too early on, and while you are initially given some space to play with them your objective quickly becomes so narrowly focused that the range of abilities you have and stimuli you're expected to react to is overwhelming. You have a double jump, a shield, a slide, and a melee attack, and all of these moves can be combined in some way (and that's just the core platforming gameplay!), but few of these more advanced maneuvers are ever useful or satisfying. If you pick up a power-up like a gun or a flashlight, your melee attack becomes unusable until the power-up's time limit runs out.
There are roughly a dozen different types of barrel in the game, most of them are introduced within the first level or two. Some have items, some are covered in spikes and will damage you, some cannot be destroyed and will give you a weapon each time you hit them, some turn into turrets (all of these barrels are the same color). Some will explode when you hit them, some will explode when you get close to them, some contain a dragon that will follow you (but only when your shield is active!) and destroy the otherwise indestructible flaming barrels (all of these barrels are the same color).
Voice acting is shockingly sparse, with many characters' reactions to important events being limited to mugging the camera. Important story scenes have dialogue that is spoken so fast that I wonder how badly the different assets of the game were fighting for disc space. You'll walk into a new area and have a short cutscene that introduces a new character, and the next time you see that character (assuming they reappear at all!) you won't even have the option of talking to them. There is no text based dialogue in the entire game; the only text you will ever read is tutorials and hints. Half of the characters in the game talk in terrible overacted voices clearly imitating various racial stereotypes. Between the silly voices, the fast-talking, and the fact that the game has no subtitles, the story as told in game is almost incomprehensible.
The main collectable, like Mario's coins or Sonic's rings, are these little orbs that make a weird monkey noise when you touch them. I got several levels into them game without understanding what they are, and had to check the manual. Basically, you're poisoned, all the time. These items are an antidote that you need to constantly replenish to stay alive. You basically have two health bars, one that only goes down when you get hit, and one that you need to constantly fill with these orbs.
There's a car section where you're in this map, it's a desert area with some small trenches and two towers connected by a bridge. To progress, you need to destroy five tanks. To destroy the tanks, you need to chase and run over these little blue things that are running around in the sand; when you hit these blue things your car gets a blue aura, and you need to hit the tanks while you have this aura. There's other cars in the area that chase you around, and if they hit you, you lose the blue aura.
The second turrent section is, until that point, the absolute low point of the game. You're on a boat with two guns, one at the back, one at the front. At the very least, you don't actually need to manage the two guns at all, as enemies will only ever spawn on one side of the boat, and you only need to move to the other gun once the area is clear. You can't hold down the fire button for very long, for some reason this is seemingly the only area where your gun has a cooldown. To keep firing without overheating, you need to tap the fire button the entire time. The enemies constantly shoot projectiles, you have to shoot the projectiles in order to destroy them. These projectiles exist for the sole purpose of making sure that you spend most of the fight shooting at something that isn't the enemy, making the fight drag on and on, likely for more than a half an hour. If you die, you start over. You probably will die, and you probably won't even know why. Maybe you were walking between the guns and a stray missile hit the boat and made a massive hitbox, maybe you didn't realize that the shield meter acts as the boat's health meter for this segment. More than likely, this is the first time in the game that the player is stuck in the same place doing the same thing for so long that the poison meter actually starts to be a problem. The boss of the level has so much health that it's basically guaranteed that you will need to abandon your post in order to restock your antidote, and in the meantime your boat will be left defenseless. It's a delicate balancing act that goes on for way longer than it has any right to.
I don't know if it comes across in text, but it's almost impossible to talk about this game's mechanics in plain terms without slipping into a James Rolfe impression. That's what I mean when I say this game already would have felt dated in 2002. Mechanically, it operates on logic so obtuse that each individual part of this game's whole could have been an Atari 2600 game. Even so, even in its mechanics, it still almost feels ahead of its time simply because the "Freeformer" (TM) is basically the blueprint for the modern AAA game. Between Tim Rogers' idea of GTA as an "argument solver" or Nakey Jakey's justification of Naughty Dog's prestige titles, the critical glorification of games that are a jack of all trades and a master of none, I had to wonder if the ideal video game for the average gamer is anything more special than a high gloss Action 52. Here it is. Haven: Call of the King is that game.
However, Haven: Call of the King feels ahead of its time primarily because it is simply a technical marvel. This is a PlayStation 2 game, it has no load times. None. You load once when you boot the game up, it lasts barely 5 seconds. You will never see another loading screen again for the entire play session. It has seamless auto-save, it typically runs at 60 frames per second, it has so many particle effects on the screen that I would think even today's particles (which exist primarily to showcase the fine detail offered by 4K) would blush! It has an enormous consistent world consisting of multiple planets.
There are two problems with this. The first is that the game is so linear that there is simply no opportunity to appreciate it. The second is that as a result the most positive impression that the game can leave on someone can be reached just by looking at the title screen for a few minutes; the title screen shows a zoom into the main planet from space, then soaring through various landscapes. Apparently, if you go through the tedious trial of collecting every optional collectable in the game, at the very end, you gain the ability to freely fly through the galaxy and find a handful of hidden levels throughout all the game's planets. Getting to that point (hell, even just getting to the end of the game without the collectables) is so tedious that I can't imagine any significant portion of the people who bothered to play this game at all have experienced it, nor should they feel obligated to.
On the other hand, the fact that the game is technically so well crafted makes it so uniquely playable. There are so many egregious instances of bullshit in this game that if dying carried the penalty of a 20 second reload, I would have dropped it so much earlier. But because there's so little downtime, because the loop of feedback and retrial is so fast, flaws that would usually be inexcusable become more tolerable. It's damn good thing you don't need to worry about lives either; most of the time when you respawn the actual game-state hasn't even changed, you just get moved back to the checkpoint, and sometimes you can even still see the thing that killed you in the exact same place it was before.
One of the other reviews on this site calls Haven a "Jak and Daxter rip-off" (and from various other sites this seems to be a common observation) and while the game isn't good enough to necessarily call this a "disservice", I do think it's inaccurate. Haven is very much of its time, but in a more complex way than ripping off a single game. The aesthetic is a combination of tacky 00's fashion and post-late-90's gross-out cartoon humor that could have easily manifested on its own. There are hints of Lord of the Rings, there's a lot of the Star Wars prequels, and C.S. Lewis (Narnia) was explicitly cited as an inspiration in interviews. It's a piece of media that very obviously comes from the perspective of contemporaneous Christianity; like a video game adaptation of Angel Wars.
The reason for this is that this, perhaps more than any other Traveler's Tales game, seems to be Jon Burton's baby; going by his credits, this appears to be one of the last games that he had a direct hand in programming. It has both a weird sort of heart and an off-putting uncanniness that I would usually only expect to see from outsider art, from random eccentric individuals online. Again, narratively inspired by C.S. Lewis, which "has a clear gospel allegory while still featuring proactive characters". Aesthetically, the concept art was done by one of the artists who did album covers for the supergroup Asia. Mechanically, it was inspired by ambitious Amiga games like Mercenary. The game was meant to be sort of deceptive about its own scope, to slowly open up and surprise the player.
Well, congratulations, we were deceived. Players were so utterly deceived that everyone thinks the game is a boring, linear, lifeless, empty action game, and frankly, they aren't even really wrong.
That final optional space-faring completionist journey is so interesting, because if that had been the game's core loop this could have been something truly groundbreaking. Haven was so damn close. Even if the game opening up had been a more gradual process, it would have made all the difference; for example, there's a moment where the player escapes a prison satellite and crash lands on an unfamiliar planet. If the player landed in a wilderness and had to organically search for civilization, that could have been interesting. Instead, Haven conveniently lands in the only place on the planet where he can find a ship to get back up into outer space.
The popular comparison is to No Man's Sky, another overly ambitious game about going to different planets, but in the actual playing of the game, this is not the experience I think most people will have. Here are a few comparisons that I think are more appropriate:
Imagine if all of Sonic Adventure's mechanics, the platforming, the flying, the pinball, the fishing. Imagine they were all just a little more polished. Imagine that the tradeoff is that half of the game's voice lines, most of your favorite songs, and ALL of the game's flavor text and NPC dialogue were completely removed.
Imagine if Bethesda made a game as big as Daggerfall, but literally every area that wasn't directly relevant to the main quest was completely empty. Imagine that if you managed to replay the entire game without taking damage, you could unlock half a dozen sidequests, and none of them were anything special.
Imagine if The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was ugly, and you didn't get a single new piece of equipment after Windfall Island.
Haven: Call of the King is not good, but it is interesting. Apparently, this game's failure is one of the main reasons that Traveler's Tales is where they are today; with this game flopping so hard, the team that would have worked on a sequel got assigned to a Lego: Knights Kingdom game that the studio would have otherwise turned down, a game that never materialized because Lego would quickly request a Star Wars tie-in in its stead.
Fun fact, if you do a bit of googling you can find out all kinds of things. I'm like 90% certain that the only reason Burton is making a Funko Pop game with his newly formed studio 10.10 Games is because Steve Jobs' widow wants his mansion, and if he's gonna have to move into a new one he'll probably need a few more million for his house-hunting budget. Not to mention Funko probably has about as much access to different IP's as Lego does, Funko is bigger right now than ever, and Burton's favorite game to work on was apparently that Lego Dimensions crossover game. Video games are stupid and I hate them. Our entire hobby really does just mutate to suit the whims of distant multi-millionaires. Very cool.
The story is so flimsy and skeletal that it's hard to truly glean any thematic substance from it at all, but if I were to try, I would focus mostly in the juxtaposition between the Golden Voice and whatever the hell that magic rock was called. Basically, they are functionally identical objects, each made to facilitate a cry for help. One exists to summon the fictional world's Messiah figure, the other for asking Haven to aid Chess, the game's damsel in distress who ultimately betrays him. If only Haven had simply done what all true Christians do, ignore a friend in need. Only then could Athellion have saved humanity.
Anyway, Haven is so out of touch, out of time, that I'm not sure if it's a wicked artifact of a darker alternate timeline, a shining example of what video games could be if developers cared more about optimization and minimizing bloat, or a caricature of exactly what the AAA industry aspires to at this very moment. Whatever.
Stuff just happens in this game. You platform, you shoot in third and first person, you do rail shooting, jey pack flying, speedboating, driving, and so on. Most of it feels fine, it feels much better than literal shovelware would. Despite the connected environments and lack of loading screens, pretty much everything you do feels completely out of context. After the opening cutscene there is no dialogue for two full levels. You have a narrative goal, but if it weren't for the fact that your current objective is always displayed on the pause screen, you would have no idea what your next logical step for achieving that goal could possibly be.
There's too much mechanical variety introduced too early on, and while you are initially given some space to play with them your objective quickly becomes so narrowly focused that the range of abilities you have and stimuli you're expected to react to is overwhelming. You have a double jump, a shield, a slide, and a melee attack, and all of these moves can be combined in some way (and that's just the core platforming gameplay!), but few of these more advanced maneuvers are ever useful or satisfying. If you pick up a power-up like a gun or a flashlight, your melee attack becomes unusable until the power-up's time limit runs out.
There are roughly a dozen different types of barrel in the game, most of them are introduced within the first level or two. Some have items, some are covered in spikes and will damage you, some cannot be destroyed and will give you a weapon each time you hit them, some turn into turrets (all of these barrels are the same color). Some will explode when you hit them, some will explode when you get close to them, some contain a dragon that will follow you (but only when your shield is active!) and destroy the otherwise indestructible flaming barrels (all of these barrels are the same color).
Voice acting is shockingly sparse, with many characters' reactions to important events being limited to mugging the camera. Important story scenes have dialogue that is spoken so fast that I wonder how badly the different assets of the game were fighting for disc space. You'll walk into a new area and have a short cutscene that introduces a new character, and the next time you see that character (assuming they reappear at all!) you won't even have the option of talking to them. There is no text based dialogue in the entire game; the only text you will ever read is tutorials and hints. Half of the characters in the game talk in terrible overacted voices clearly imitating various racial stereotypes. Between the silly voices, the fast-talking, and the fact that the game has no subtitles, the story as told in game is almost incomprehensible.
The main collectable, like Mario's coins or Sonic's rings, are these little orbs that make a weird monkey noise when you touch them. I got several levels into them game without understanding what they are, and had to check the manual. Basically, you're poisoned, all the time. These items are an antidote that you need to constantly replenish to stay alive. You basically have two health bars, one that only goes down when you get hit, and one that you need to constantly fill with these orbs.
There's a car section where you're in this map, it's a desert area with some small trenches and two towers connected by a bridge. To progress, you need to destroy five tanks. To destroy the tanks, you need to chase and run over these little blue things that are running around in the sand; when you hit these blue things your car gets a blue aura, and you need to hit the tanks while you have this aura. There's other cars in the area that chase you around, and if they hit you, you lose the blue aura.
The second turrent section is, until that point, the absolute low point of the game. You're on a boat with two guns, one at the back, one at the front. At the very least, you don't actually need to manage the two guns at all, as enemies will only ever spawn on one side of the boat, and you only need to move to the other gun once the area is clear. You can't hold down the fire button for very long, for some reason this is seemingly the only area where your gun has a cooldown. To keep firing without overheating, you need to tap the fire button the entire time. The enemies constantly shoot projectiles, you have to shoot the projectiles in order to destroy them. These projectiles exist for the sole purpose of making sure that you spend most of the fight shooting at something that isn't the enemy, making the fight drag on and on, likely for more than a half an hour. If you die, you start over. You probably will die, and you probably won't even know why. Maybe you were walking between the guns and a stray missile hit the boat and made a massive hitbox, maybe you didn't realize that the shield meter acts as the boat's health meter for this segment. More than likely, this is the first time in the game that the player is stuck in the same place doing the same thing for so long that the poison meter actually starts to be a problem. The boss of the level has so much health that it's basically guaranteed that you will need to abandon your post in order to restock your antidote, and in the meantime your boat will be left defenseless. It's a delicate balancing act that goes on for way longer than it has any right to.
I don't know if it comes across in text, but it's almost impossible to talk about this game's mechanics in plain terms without slipping into a James Rolfe impression. That's what I mean when I say this game already would have felt dated in 2002. Mechanically, it operates on logic so obtuse that each individual part of this game's whole could have been an Atari 2600 game. Even so, even in its mechanics, it still almost feels ahead of its time simply because the "Freeformer" (TM) is basically the blueprint for the modern AAA game. Between Tim Rogers' idea of GTA as an "argument solver" or Nakey Jakey's justification of Naughty Dog's prestige titles, the critical glorification of games that are a jack of all trades and a master of none, I had to wonder if the ideal video game for the average gamer is anything more special than a high gloss Action 52. Here it is. Haven: Call of the King is that game.
However, Haven: Call of the King feels ahead of its time primarily because it is simply a technical marvel. This is a PlayStation 2 game, it has no load times. None. You load once when you boot the game up, it lasts barely 5 seconds. You will never see another loading screen again for the entire play session. It has seamless auto-save, it typically runs at 60 frames per second, it has so many particle effects on the screen that I would think even today's particles (which exist primarily to showcase the fine detail offered by 4K) would blush! It has an enormous consistent world consisting of multiple planets.
There are two problems with this. The first is that the game is so linear that there is simply no opportunity to appreciate it. The second is that as a result the most positive impression that the game can leave on someone can be reached just by looking at the title screen for a few minutes; the title screen shows a zoom into the main planet from space, then soaring through various landscapes. Apparently, if you go through the tedious trial of collecting every optional collectable in the game, at the very end, you gain the ability to freely fly through the galaxy and find a handful of hidden levels throughout all the game's planets. Getting to that point (hell, even just getting to the end of the game without the collectables) is so tedious that I can't imagine any significant portion of the people who bothered to play this game at all have experienced it, nor should they feel obligated to.
On the other hand, the fact that the game is technically so well crafted makes it so uniquely playable. There are so many egregious instances of bullshit in this game that if dying carried the penalty of a 20 second reload, I would have dropped it so much earlier. But because there's so little downtime, because the loop of feedback and retrial is so fast, flaws that would usually be inexcusable become more tolerable. It's damn good thing you don't need to worry about lives either; most of the time when you respawn the actual game-state hasn't even changed, you just get moved back to the checkpoint, and sometimes you can even still see the thing that killed you in the exact same place it was before.
One of the other reviews on this site calls Haven a "Jak and Daxter rip-off" (and from various other sites this seems to be a common observation) and while the game isn't good enough to necessarily call this a "disservice", I do think it's inaccurate. Haven is very much of its time, but in a more complex way than ripping off a single game. The aesthetic is a combination of tacky 00's fashion and post-late-90's gross-out cartoon humor that could have easily manifested on its own. There are hints of Lord of the Rings, there's a lot of the Star Wars prequels, and C.S. Lewis (Narnia) was explicitly cited as an inspiration in interviews. It's a piece of media that very obviously comes from the perspective of contemporaneous Christianity; like a video game adaptation of Angel Wars.
The reason for this is that this, perhaps more than any other Traveler's Tales game, seems to be Jon Burton's baby; going by his credits, this appears to be one of the last games that he had a direct hand in programming. It has both a weird sort of heart and an off-putting uncanniness that I would usually only expect to see from outsider art, from random eccentric individuals online. Again, narratively inspired by C.S. Lewis, which "has a clear gospel allegory while still featuring proactive characters". Aesthetically, the concept art was done by one of the artists who did album covers for the supergroup Asia. Mechanically, it was inspired by ambitious Amiga games like Mercenary. The game was meant to be sort of deceptive about its own scope, to slowly open up and surprise the player.
Well, congratulations, we were deceived. Players were so utterly deceived that everyone thinks the game is a boring, linear, lifeless, empty action game, and frankly, they aren't even really wrong.
That final optional space-faring completionist journey is so interesting, because if that had been the game's core loop this could have been something truly groundbreaking. Haven was so damn close. Even if the game opening up had been a more gradual process, it would have made all the difference; for example, there's a moment where the player escapes a prison satellite and crash lands on an unfamiliar planet. If the player landed in a wilderness and had to organically search for civilization, that could have been interesting. Instead, Haven conveniently lands in the only place on the planet where he can find a ship to get back up into outer space.
The popular comparison is to No Man's Sky, another overly ambitious game about going to different planets, but in the actual playing of the game, this is not the experience I think most people will have. Here are a few comparisons that I think are more appropriate:
Imagine if all of Sonic Adventure's mechanics, the platforming, the flying, the pinball, the fishing. Imagine they were all just a little more polished. Imagine that the tradeoff is that half of the game's voice lines, most of your favorite songs, and ALL of the game's flavor text and NPC dialogue were completely removed.
Imagine if Bethesda made a game as big as Daggerfall, but literally every area that wasn't directly relevant to the main quest was completely empty. Imagine that if you managed to replay the entire game without taking damage, you could unlock half a dozen sidequests, and none of them were anything special.
Imagine if The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was ugly, and you didn't get a single new piece of equipment after Windfall Island.
Haven: Call of the King is not good, but it is interesting. Apparently, this game's failure is one of the main reasons that Traveler's Tales is where they are today; with this game flopping so hard, the team that would have worked on a sequel got assigned to a Lego: Knights Kingdom game that the studio would have otherwise turned down, a game that never materialized because Lego would quickly request a Star Wars tie-in in its stead.
Fun fact, if you do a bit of googling you can find out all kinds of things. I'm like 90% certain that the only reason Burton is making a Funko Pop game with his newly formed studio 10.10 Games is because Steve Jobs' widow wants his mansion, and if he's gonna have to move into a new one he'll probably need a few more million for his house-hunting budget. Not to mention Funko probably has about as much access to different IP's as Lego does, Funko is bigger right now than ever, and Burton's favorite game to work on was apparently that Lego Dimensions crossover game. Video games are stupid and I hate them. Our entire hobby really does just mutate to suit the whims of distant multi-millionaires. Very cool.
The story is so flimsy and skeletal that it's hard to truly glean any thematic substance from it at all, but if I were to try, I would focus mostly in the juxtaposition between the Golden Voice and whatever the hell that magic rock was called. Basically, they are functionally identical objects, each made to facilitate a cry for help. One exists to summon the fictional world's Messiah figure, the other for asking Haven to aid Chess, the game's damsel in distress who ultimately betrays him. If only Haven had simply done what all true Christians do, ignore a friend in need. Only then could Athellion have saved humanity.
Anyway, Haven is so out of touch, out of time, that I'm not sure if it's a wicked artifact of a darker alternate timeline, a shining example of what video games could be if developers cared more about optimization and minimizing bloat, or a caricature of exactly what the AAA industry aspires to at this very moment. Whatever.
Reviewed on Sep 09, 2022
Hejin
1 year ago