Haze

Let’s all do a few warm up exercises before diving into Haze. First, breathe. This is important because a regular stable breathing pattern will help you work through your inner turmoil 9 times out of ten. Now relax, shake out – yes that’s right, shake your hands and arms and do a little running on the spot.

Now breathe again, and pretend that this week never happened, and the Kane and Lynch-like furore that’s seemingly sprung up around Ubisoft / Free Radical’s Haze is just a figment of your imagination.

Are you ready now? Are you calm? Okay then, now you’re fit and able to approach this Haze review much in the same way I approached the game – with an open, objective mind and no callous rudeness or clever epithets burning their way through your inner monologue ready to be vented from an inflamed spleen.

Haze is a first person shoot ‘em up crafted by a team with a heck of a pedigree in the genre. Free Radical had a hand in the legendary N64 Bond-themed FPS Goldeneye before a big split from Rare, and the formation of their present team. They’ve also got the superb Timesplitters series under their belt, as well as a little-known game that’s a personal favourite, Second Site.

Haze is the first time the team have given the current generation of consoles the benefit of their experience, and since the game was first mooted, lots of people have been closely following its development expecting great things.

Haze’s storyline certainly won’t win any Hugo awards, relating the tale of one Shane Carpenter, a guy fresh out of college and enlisted in the Mantel Corporation’s “peace corps”. Mantel soldiers are sent to deal with a rebel insurrection, led by a vicious killer known as “Skin Coat” who allegedly flays his victims and wears their skins.

All Mantel troops rely heavily on a drug known as “Nectar” which supposedly boosts mental and physical performance. Using Nectar in the game helps to slow down your rate of injury, and also helps you pick out enemy soldiers hiding in the dense jungle.

As Carpenter soon finds out, all is not what it seems with the rebels, the Mantel Corporation or indeed the nefarious Nectar.

After the usual 10 minute PS3 installation routine finishes, you can leap straight into the action in campaign mode and start to play through the main storyline. The in-game tutorial introduces you to the use of Nectar, and the way the various weapon types work before you encounter the rebels and start to pick them off.

Free Radical’s pedigree shows here at first, as the gunplay feels nicely balanced and satisfying. Quickly pressing the L2 button will give you a Nectar boost, showing the enemy soldiers up as a bright glowing outline and making them easier targets. Too much Nectar can cause you to go slightly schizo though, so err on the side of caution.

In the opening scenes of the game you’re sent to investigate a crashed Mantel aircraft, carrying troops and Nectar to the front line. Dropped into the jungle via drop ship, the game manages a reasonable job of rendering the foliage and greenery quite nicely, though there’s a tendency for the developers to rely a little too heavily on slightly muddy-looking low resolution textures. No V-Synch tearing though which is a definite bonus in a PS3 game so heavily reliant on immersion.

Pretty soon though as you begin to progress, the ragged fragile threads binding the game together start to unravel. Your AI squad mates have a bizarre fascination with the end of your gun barrel, and will take every single opportunity they can to get in front of it or wrap themselves around it – meaning that zooming in to take pot-shots at the rebels usually means you end up head-shotting your team mates. If your squad are hit on the Nectar Controllers by stray rebel shots, they’ll go bananas and start shooting at you. This is actually an intentional piece of game design but nonetheless it becomes an annoying one – as you sometimes find you spend as much time killing your own side as you do the enemy.

Along with the low-res texturing and AI quirks there’s a distinct lack of polish in the sound production, with cut-scenes in particular proving to be glitch-raddled and badly done (and while we’re on the subject of cut-scenes, unskippable ones in any game in this day and age are unforgivable, even if they’re there to disguise lengthy load times as is probably the case here in Haze).

The lack of polish extends further with some quite bizarre graphical glitching and a generally shoddy feel to proceedings the further into the game you progress. Non-player character models, both Mantel and Rebel, look like something from a PS2 / Xbox game, lacking detail and finish. Level design feels hurried and often frustrating, not exactly winning you over by giving you the impression that you’ve seen it all done before so much better in a thousand other first-person shooters.

My hopes were initially slightly buoyed by the fact that Haze contained elements of vehicular combat, which is usually something that wins me over even in a dreadful game but with the mantel and rebel jeeps and quad bikes being so dreadful to control, with no real physics systems to them and no sensation that you’re even in proper control as you barrel through the driving sections, Haze begins to feel like a whole lot of expended effort for very little reward.

Things slightly improve “Post-game-twist” but just as you begin to wonder how much more you’ll have to wade through, Haze ends abruptly with an unsatisfying conclusion. No shocks, no real climactic encounters, just a whole bunch of blandness leaving you pinning your hopes to the multiplayer modes in order to try and scrape back your money’s worth.

Actually, in some ways multiplayer could be the title’s only saving grace because Free Radical Design have put some effort in to ensure that you get a couple of nice features not really found anywhere else in PS3 multiplayer titles.

First you can invite friends to join your session mid-game, with a little invite icon popping up on their screen and letting them know you’re ready for a bit of co-op or deathmatch action. Then the netcode’s clever enough to do some session switching if a host drops. All this is bread and butter to anyone who’s already used to the seamless service offered by the rival Xbox Live platform, but for PSN network players, these measures are most welcome.

All told, you’ve got to really really love multiplayer FPS stuff because again apart from those couple of reasonably nice features, the co-op modes and other stuff are ripped straight from the bible of blandness and the chances are that even if you absolutely can’t get enough of putting bullets into the heads of networked players, you’ll bore of the whole thing a lot quicker than you should.

Essentially, gathering all the evidence together and trying to put a big fat thumb on what is exactly wrong with Haze isn’t easy. Perhaps it’s not actually Haze that we should be directing our ire at, rather the genre itself which again and again sees games relying far too heavily on one or two gameplay quirks to keep the whole thing up and running. There have been so many shooters of this ilk that try to introduce one or two new or supposedly groundbreaking elements into the FPS mix in order to sell you the same type of product again and again, and in Haze’s case even the Nectar “quirk” is short lived. Reading other reviews of Haze which endlessly compare it against just about every other FPS game out there, perhaps history may show that Haze was the last straw that broke the camel’s back, and players just stopped putting up with the bland, the formulaic and the familiar and demanded a whole bucketload more innovation from their shooters.

Even on a platform not exactly drowning in titles, Haze would have to measure up against the likes of Resistance: Fall of Man 1 and 2, Killzone 2 and newer titles such as Mirror’s Edge before it’d be worthy of your consideration.

Though it’s not as completely hideous as it’s painted, it’s not really even good enough to be called average. Haze spends far too much of its time trying to recreate completely worn out scenarios, gameplay elements and characters to really shine against other games in the genre. Perhaps one day when it’s kicking around in your local game store’s 3 for 30 quid bin you might pick it up and in hindsight find a little love for it, but as a supposed example of the PS3’s considerable power, and as a full priced title nestling in the summer release schedules of 2008 Haze is really not worth more than a passing glance.

Our rating

4/10