Haze

A great idea is lost amongst less than great gameplay. David Hollingworth takes another hit of Nectar for the team.

The humble First Person Shooter is one of those iconic gaming genres that is at one and the same time an essential part of PC – and now console – gaming, while also constantly hyped as being a dying breed. Haze, on PS3, tried very desperately to bring some freshness to the run and gun mix, but only serves to offer up another nail in the coffin-sized arsenal of the naysayers and doomtalkers of the gaming world.

The real tragedy of Haze, however, isn’t how poor the game is, but rather how good the idea behind the game actually is.

You play Shane Carpenter (probably the most boring name in gaming history), a soldier in the employ of Mantel Global Industries. Mantel is in the middle of putting down some kind of local revolution in some un-named generic location. It’s pretty much a cookie-cutter plot straight from the Big Book of Plots, but the twist – and a pretty good one at that – is that Mantel not only specialises in manpower, but in chemical research. To that end, its soldiers are equipped with a drug called Nectar. It boosts combat performance and cheers you up no end, making for happy and effective killing machines.

You get introduced to the idea of using the drug regularly early on, and the fate of an NPC who isn’t comfortable with the drug is actually quite intriguing. The banter of your squadmates is collegiate at best, but then again they’re high as heavily armed kites. All up, the first five minutes of the game sets up a rather disturbing state of paranoia, as you blast hit after hit of the drug and watch your pals yuck it up.



At this stage we got our first taste of combat, which was pretty lame. Once you Nectar up, it’s pretty much a turkey shoot, and apart from being able to play dead, the enemy AI isn’t all that clever. What’s more, we thought at first, the engine couldn’t even handle persistent bodies – they faded away after each gunfight! As the game continues, though, you start to get the feeling that what you’re seeing – and hearing – in your drugged state, may not actually be the real world, but rather a sanitised version of it to keep soldiers happy and killing.

Unsurprisingly, you eventually go over to the rebel side to take down the evil mega-corp, and you have to learn a whole new set of skills to take on your old comrades. Unfortunately, however, by that stage you may not care, as the game pretty much sucks.



The combat seems remarkably anaemic, even once you get off the wonder-drug Nectar. The AI plays a big part in this, as badguys seem to stumble toward you without really using the plentiful cover on the battlefield. Nearly every fight can simply be ended with ease by flanking the enemy. The weapons feel samey, even though you’re introduced to a wide range early on, and don’t get us started on the driving levels. It’s as if someone played through Halo, and then turned around to the dev team and said “Hey, let’s make that, but with less time and effort!”

The game’s engine, developed in-house by Free Radical – and really, there are people there who should know better – doesn’t help things either, rendering scenes in fits and starts and simply not up to the kind of detail and mood the game aims for.



It’s a small mercy that the game is also too short, and that the multiplayer is an afterthought, then.

Ultimately, Haze is very obviously a once-ambitious project that fell into development hell a year or so ago and has never really struggled out.