Haze
May 30,2008 - There’s always a delicate balance when it comes to exclusives building and riding hype until their release. When Haze was delayed to 2008 from its original fall 2007 release date, it lost nearly all the hype it had built up, so the game’s impact is far less than a game like Metal Gear Solid 4. Luckily for Ubisoft, that means that releasing a bomb won’t damage the PS3’s reputation like Lair did last year, but it also means that they can’t expect much in the way of sales just based on the hype. Did Haze manage to become a surprise hit or should Ubisoft call in the bomb squad?

Haze takes place in the year 2048 in a South America where the Mantel Global Industries’ soldiers are invading and fighting the rebels for whatever reason, as the game never really explains why. As a grunt in this fighting force, you’re one of the many men taking their breakthrough drug, called Nectar, that can make you faster, stronger, more accurate, and an overall better soldier. While on the trail of the rebels’ leader, you get an interesting bit of advice that causes you to realize what you’re doing and jump sides. There you see the evils of Nectar and what Mantel is doing and fight with the rebels to stop the evil corporation from succeeding in their evil plot. If you notice, the game’s taken a few of the big topics of this era, namely steroids and the Iraq War, and injected them into a story that takes place far into the future, so it seems like nobody learned from the past, so they were doomed to repeat it.

As clichéd and hackneyed as the story seems, it impacts the gameplay of Haze more than anything else. As a Mantel soldier, you can inject Nectar with the L2 button to highlight enemies hiding in the foliage, run a bit faster, and be a bit tougher to take down, but when it comes down to it, it feels more like you’re compensating for poor gameplay tuning, though maybe the Nectar’s supposed to turn mediocre soldiers into shooting machines. Once you jump to the rebels’ side of the fight, the gameplay opens up a bit, as you can collect Nectar pucks from your enemies to add to grenades or knives to overdose your enemies on Nectar, so they bug out and start shooting at their comrades. You also gain dodge maneuvers, the ability to play dead, and an overall feeling of being lighter and more agile that probably comes from getting rid of the big, heavy suits that Mantel soldiers wears. There are also driving segments that are sprinkled throughout the game, but these are rather poor segments as the control is off and your teammates, who will man the turrets on these vehicles, are just too stupid to be any help when you’ve got vehicles chasing your tail.

The AI of Haze is the biggest sign that this game is made only to be played with for real people rather than one real person and three dumb AI. There will be tough spots where your teammates will be easily picked off and instead of respawning nearby; they are out of the picture until you reach the next checkpoint, which is most likely after this tough sequence you’re facing. While games like Rainbow Six Vegas 2 show that good teammates who are competent are extremely valuable resources for these kinds of squad-based game, it seems like Free Radical banked on the co-op as being their saving grace, which it is. Multiplayer has generally been the one of Free Radical’s headlining features of their games, but it seems so half-assed here. You get three multiplayer modes, team deathmatch, deathmatch, and team assault, and six maps, which is easily outdone by the best multiplayer FPS on the PS3 and Xbox 360. How Haze can be released in this manner and expect to compete with games like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, with such a paltry showing has to be the biggest question about this game.

The visuals of Haze give the impression that this could have been a PS3 launch game whose developers fell asleep for a year and a half. Dead bodies disappear seconds after they drop, the environments are bland and lifeless, and the soldiers and rebels themselves look like high-res models of what used to be a PS2 game. The graphics aren’t really all that bad, but with the recent uprising of great FPS’s in the past six months or so, you have to wonder what Free Radical’s been doing with the extra time they were given with the delay. Luckily, load times are fairly small and the framerate is smooth enough.

Haze’s audio performance isn’t really all that different from how it looks in the visual department. Your fellow soldiers are homophobic white boys listening to rap, which ironically sounds like the rap of 2008, and yelling out catchphrases constantly during missions about how they’re going to kick ass and all these generic catchphrases that may have been done on purpose to turn you off personally on these guys and this whole side of the way in general. Once you are fighting for the rebels, your comrades constantly prattle on about fighting for Merino, the rebel leader, and taking down those Mantel scum. The vehicles are not fast at all, which is surprising when the engines sound like you should be going 150 MPH and blazing past any enemies that dare try to stop you.

When it comes down to it, Haze isn’t a bad game at all, just a very mediocre game that would have felt more at home a year and a half ago at the PlayStation 3’s launch. Being a game coming out in 2008, with the likes of Halo 3 doing much of what Haze is doing for over eight months now, it’s amazing what Ubisoft and Free Radical have actually let out of the bag with confidence. It’s just lucky for them that they’ve lost all of their hype that would’ve made this the second-coming of Lair, though for different reasons. If you’re somehow compelled to play this game, stick to renting it and saving yourself the $60 for an exclusive that should actually deliver on its hype, Metal Gear Solid 4.

Games, News, Reviews, Media and More