fantasy

In Haven, you travel to all sorts of places on land, sea, and sky. It's very good they give you the missions so you know what you are trying to do. I really liked most of the platform parts, like going into temples and riding the spinning fans. However, the yo-yo is hard to handle, and you end up hurting yourself if you don't throw it in the exact right direction. It's pretty hard to find all the feathers you have to collect too. This game is long, and that could be good or bad, depending on how much you enjoy it.

Haven is a game that brings many different genres into one game. There is platforming, racing, hang gliding, but most importantly shooting. So many shooting missions come up, which are difficult and confusing. Often you have to shoot many things at once, which is somewhat frustrating. There are too many levels where you fly around in your biplane, trying to find what to shoot; I don't like that. The graphics are some of the worst I've seen on PS2. Some parts are more fun than others, so I give Haven a mediocre score. I hope that my future game purchases will be better than this.

The title Haven: Call Of The King just sounds SO RPG that it's not even funny. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Haven is actually a platform/adventure/racing/shooting/flying game... which leads one to believe that an entirely new genre classification might be in order for this ambitious project.

Centering around the title character, who is from the planet Auria - home to the Aurians who have been enslaved by the evil Lord Vetch, Haven manages to cover an astounding amount of ground while remaining cohesive and very fluid in its game play.
According to an Aurian prophecy, there will be a 'chosen one' who will free the Aurian people, and (you guessed it), Haven is that one... corn rows and all.

The meat of the game is a third person platform-like experience, complete with power ups and collecting items that will allow you to gain access to additional areas. One of the coolest items at Haven's disposal is his shield, which can also be used as a weapon and to mask noises - allowing for some stealth capability. Weapons include a modified mining laser that can be used to dispatch enemies or to catch and ride energy streams which lead to new areas.

The platform levels of Haven are extensive and well-executed but they are only part of the game. In addition to the foot based adventures, you will also pilot many different vehicles. These include gliders, speedboats, spacecraft and buggies. These levels will involve either racing, shooting or arial combat. Spacecraft will also be utilized in travelling to other worlds, and will allow for the possibility of finding warp gates that take you to new places in the galaxy.

Haven: COTK pushes the PS2 to its technical limits with several visual tricks/effects on display, including: heat distortion, particle effects, light sourcing, real-time shadows, real-time reflections, weather effects, and day-night cycles.

One of the stand out visual effects is the fractally generated landscape surrounding you, which provides for some amazing looking environments. For instance, when you board a ship in a third-person sequence in the game, you'll be able to take off and head out into space without a loading screen. The game tracks your movement and reduces the size and detail of the environments as you gain altitude. The reverse is true when you're approaching a planet and go to land your spaceship. You will find that detail seen from the air will scale in as you get closer.

In the end, Haven tries to do a LOT of things in one game, and for the most part - it succeeds wonderfully.

Haven takes your typical platformer and turns it into a string of mini-games. This could have been cool if it was done right. You transition seamlessly between say, driving a boat, to putting out fires while flying with a rocketpack, to fighting a lava monster, to rolling down a path Super Monkey Ball-style. However, there are some big problems.

First of all, the graphics. The characters are ugly and poorly designed, and the animation isn't much. Enemies turn into flat 2D sprites that animate at 1/2 frame per second as they get further away from you. This game's engine is supposed to be able to handle 1000 onscreen characters, but you'll soon realize that 990 of these will be poorly-animated sprites. There are also some camera problems.

Second, the music and sound. I don't remember any of the music, so it can't have been good. I do remember the voice acting, however; it's terrible and ridiculously low-budget. I wouldn't count it too unlikely that all the characters were voiced by the developers.

Another problem is the continue points. When you die, it will sometimes set you so far back that it will take you 10 minutes to get back to where you died (and you'll probably die several times in some places).

The cutscenes and story are terrible. For some reason, everything in the cutscenes seems to be happening faster than the characters can say something about what's going on.

Overall, a pretty lousy game. It had potential, but frankly, I think it needed to be given to a more capable developer than Traveller's Tales (who also made the PS2 Crash Bandicoot). You might enjoy it for an hour or two, but you'll probably get tired of it.