Once upon a time…
Long ago, the good king Arellion was forced to depart his home planet to fight in a galactic war. He left a bell called the Golden Voice on the top of Mount Sighs, which was to be rung if ever Arellion was required on the planet. Unfortunately, the evil Lord Vetch enslaved Arellion’s people and surrounded the Golden Voice with his most elite security forced. Every slave was infected with a virus which required a constant source of Catana, the antidote. This would make sure that none of the slaves would disobey Vetch’s bidding. Recently, a young slave named Haven has been having weird dreams about a bell, a king, and becoming a hero. Haven carelessly tells some of his friends about the dreams, and word of them reaches one of Vetch’s informants. Vetch insists on his destruction, but Haven narrowly escapes. After being banished to unfamiliar territory, Haven sets off on a quest to find out the meaning of his dreams.
Let’s be frank. The “every genre” lines you were fed about Haven are utter codswallop. Haven is actually just another uninspired platformer/collection fest, with the usual flying and racing bits tacked on. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have its moments, which are actually frequent and good early on, but these good moments are few in number, and are usually separated by the mind-numbingly boring “collect the cogs and bring them here”, or “collect the feathers and call Talon”, and so on.
I could possibly be mistaken, but it feels as if Haven shares the same technology from Traveller’s Tales last PS2 effort Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. The main goal in Haven is to move from area to area, collecting Catana to keep yourself alive, and perform various objectives in each area. Usually the objectives involve collecting cogs, feathers, keys, and giving them to a man, machine, or something else. When the objective is complete and event usually happens that will move you to the next area, where you repeat the process.
Occasionally, these cog collecting sequences will be broken up by some vehicle bits. A wide variety of vehicles are included in the game, such as speedboats, cars, turrets on the back of a train or cruise ship, planes, space ships, and more. Some parts of these sequences make playing through the cog collecting sequences worth while – it is great seeing Haven in his ship re-entering the atmosphere of a planet, while others only help in making the overall experience dire.
These repetitive sequences are only really the beginning of Haven’s problems. The game has incredibly two incredibly long loading sequences before you get into the game, timed at about a minute each. Thankfully, they are the only loading experiences you will encounter, as the loading of other areas just seems to happen in a jump. Control is the next problem, as it tends to be slightly unresponsive during some of the platforming sections of the game, and can be decidedly loose while piloting the vehicles. The final problem; it’s just not terribly exciting. The plot doesn’t develop particularly well, the objectives are plain, and repeated often, and the few cool bits (The coliseum, the bug puzzles) are very short lived. Everything has a generic platformer feel to it, almost like they didn’t really put too much effort into it.
Apparently someone good enough to base a few press releases around, Rodney Matthews is supposed to be a well known artist (people who knows something about art might be able to attest to that, I’m a mere simpleton in that area), who came up with the conceptual 3D art for Haven: Call of the King. The ideas for most of the vehicles and enemies are actually pretty good with their slightly obscure look and feel. The main character, Haven, is supposed to be kind of cool, with his dyed red crop row hair, and yo-yo, though this supposed coolness doesn’t really ring true. Other designs in the game aren’t particularly mind blowing, but serve their purpose well enough.
The in-game graphical style is much like that of Crash, with plenty of bright colours and a relatively fast pace. The models on the characters are fairly ordinary, but they feature some very nice details – such as Haven putting his hood on when it starts raining. Animations of the characters are fairly ordinary, and don’t really show anything worth mentioning. Everything seems a little blocky and aliased, which harms the overall graphical style.
Haven’s environments are fairly impressive in size, featuring wide open spaces with incredible draw distances, which hold literally hundreds of characters without slowing down. Unfortunately, there isn’t really too much room for detail, as what has been delivered is barely average. A variety of climates and locations are featured throughout the game, as well as a mixed of science fiction and medieval-esque themes; one minute you are in a harbor town, with all sorts of old-style homes and things, next you are in a giant space ship outside the planet’s atmosphere, running away from robots.
The soundtrack in Haven varies nearly as much as the environments do. In some scenes, it is an epic orchestral score, while in others it may be heart pumping techno. The vocal work is highly ordinary and the dialogue itself is nothing special. Some moments feature highly stereotypical surfer “dudes”, who tend to speak in the usual surfer dude tone. Moments like this cheapen the game, and don’t help to shake the generic feel given off by the gameplay. Sound effects are on par with most other games on the market, though the game is relatively devoid of any surround sound support.
Haven: Call of the King’s main quest is relatively long, clocking about 20-25 hours for the main game, as well as time to collect the extra secret runes and black orbs. These special items unlock pictures and concept art in the game’s art gallery. There is also a small documentary featuring interviews with the developers available from the beginning. 20-25 hours is still a fairly long game in my book, and when you take into consideration the slow and repetitive nature of the game, that 20-25 hours is going to be a real chore. Strike up another mediocre effort from Traveller’s Tales.
Loading...
