You have to give some credit to Mat Dickie for at least trying new things. Sure, his biggest claim to fame might be the popular wrestling and booking (wrestling management sim) titles he has produced over the last few years, but in between those titles have been a string of near-misses and failures. Not failures in the sense that they were lousy games, but that fans either didn't enjoy the subject matter or the concept didn't ultimately work.

Admittedly, Mat Dickie's latest game, Hard Time, is less of a gamble than previous games because at its heart it is a fighting game disguised as a light prison simulation. While fighting isn't the only thing you can do in the game, it is certainly one of the activities you'll spend the most amount of time engaging in. But before I continue, it should be noted that this is far from a realistic prison simulation. From the activities and personalities roaming the cellblocks to the weapons laid out in every room, there's a lot of loose activity going on in Mat's prison game that would never happen in the real word..

Hard Time lets you create a criminal and send him straight to court for a sentence to a maximum security prison where you immediately figure out that jail is indeed no picnic. From day one you begin to see that you have to make some hard choices - do your time and stay out of trouble or get into the prison culture by cracking a few skulls and avoid getting caught by "the man." These choices must be made carefully because every infraction you get pinched for will lead you back to a court room where a judge may add more time to your sentence. And time is your greatest adversary in Hard Time, because it literally drags on forever.

Your sentence is carried out in days rather than years, and while serving 60 days for murder might sound like a walk in the park, the game ticks time in a way that makes a 60 day stint actually feel like 60 years. So getting in trouble and getting 6 days added to your sentence for beating on someone isn't exactly a bargain - no matter how hard core you want to be in the game.

The game does a nice job of dealing up prison culture without being too offensive and being sensative to race. This way real world racism can be depicted without getting into the low language you'd expect to be associated with it. The game also deals with the corruption of prison officials in a great way - if a "warden" gets caught in a corruption charge they are stripped of their status and turned into a prison. In the real world this would be a death sentence but in the game they just become one of the many sheep you'll have to deal with. Luckily Dickie avoided the whole sexual side of the equation altogether, so you don't have to worry about being violated in the shower.. Simulated rape is just as disturbing as the real thing, and a tough topic to sugar coat.

There are other things to do besides commit acts of violence in Hard Time. You can work in the library or in the workshop to earn money or work in the kitchen preparing meals for the prisoners. In your free time you can watch television, read books and even play basketball or lift weights. All of this stuff has an affect on either stats or how much money you have, which in turn can be used for other things like buying contraband, paying off a snitch or buying temporary protection.

There are, of course other ways to make money that are less wholesome, like silencing someone's enemies, taking protection money ort running various errands. The whole system is pretty well balanced, and players should have no problem dabbling in both wholesome and dark activates as long as they are careful about it.

While violence isn't the most important part in the game, it does play an integral role in how things work in the prison. But Hard Time doesn't make it so that you always have to fight over every little thing. You can negotiate your way out of a lot of little misunderstanding if need be, or just simply run away. But if you prefer the heavy handed method of dealing with your problems then there's certainly nothing wrong with beating the snot out of another inmate or even a warden. The real trick to doing it right is to avoid having a witnesses present. This poses a problem because you may find yourself the victim of a domino effect where killing one person may ultimately lead to killing multiple people. After awhile it gets messy and players that are hell-bent on raising kane find themselves standing before "the man" in no time flat and having their sentence extended and their money depleted. Since the goal of the game is reducing your sentence it doesn't make sense to go on a rampage.

Graphically Hard Time is better looking the Wrestling Encore, but the engine being used to deliver these games is certainly starting to show its age. What this game does offer is an open ended environment and the ability to display a lot more characters on-screen than any other Mat Dickie game, save World War Alpha. But the game is not without its problems. For being an open ended environment there is an awful lot of loading and unloading of resources every time you enter and exit areas of the prison. This adds a slight wait time between areas, which can be a real pain to deal with at times. There is also a slight bug in this particular version of the game where the AI uses you as an example in a dialogue tree - for example, the game might say "James Fudge is a friend of mine, don't mess with him" and then attack ... James Fudge. It's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's one of those things a one man development team has a habit of missing..

At the end of the day, Hard Time proves to be a unique and entertaining game that lacks polish. It's safe to say that Mat Dickie is trying to squeeze every ounce of power out of the game engine he has been using for his latest games, but it may be time for him to consider some different alternatives that can handle what his games need in order to look and perform better. Despite the dated graphics and characters, Hard Time is a great game experience that will grow on you if given a chance. Mat Dickie proves that he can take just about any topic and turn into a game that is usually worth playing. If you can get past the slight initial learning curve, Hard Time is worth downloading, checking out and ultimately purchasing.