Haze Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 5th June 2008

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We review Haze, but will we get the PS3 blockbuster we were promised?

Haze Details:

	First Person Shooter
	PlayStation 3
	Ubisoft
	Ubisoft

18+

Out Now

N/A

In today’s modern games industry it easy for a companies marketing department to hype a game up, getting us gamers all excited looking forward to its release. These games usually have all the trappings to be great, unfortunately they can sometimes disappoint their gaming public and since this latest first person shooter has been getting a lot of hype, will it live up to it or leave us feeling hazy?

Haze is set in 2048 were military operations have been outsourced by governments to private military companies. You take up the role of Shane Carpenter a new trooper in the Mantel Corporations army, as the leading private military company Mantel have an arsenal of devastating weapons and vehicles at their disposal including a performance enhancing stimulant known as Nectar that makes their troopers stronger, faster and deadlier then anyone else’s.

The game begins with you sent to a South American country to crush a rebel faction know as the Promise Hand, however your equipment malfunctions and you soon start to see things as they really are and leave the grip of the corrupt Mantel and switch to help the Promise Hand and uncover the truth about Nectar.

Haze is pretty much set out like any other modern day shooter, cut scenes progress the story and missions have a set of objective to complete. New objectives are added as you progress through the mission and you are required to complete these in order to be successful in your main objective.

What makes Haze different from other first person shooters is Nectar the stimulating drug that is used by you when you’re fighting for both sides, albeit in completely different ways. When you are still working for the Mantel Corporation Nectar is used as a performance enhancer enabling you to see enemies as a glowing light in the darkness of the various environments, Nectar also makes you faster and stronger and can also give you a health boost healing you faster should you get in trouble. However, when you are fighting for the Promise Hand Nectar can be used against Mantel’s troops making them overdose driving them temporally insane, attacking their own men. This is done by stripping the Nectar administrator off a fallen enemy and strapping it to a grenade and hurling it into a group of troops throwing up a cloud of the drug. It’s a pretty nice addition and can be quite entertaining watching the troopers annihilate each other, although it can sometimes work against you if you get in their way. This was one of Haze’s bragging points but for me it hasn’t been implemented as well as it could have been and you will often find yourself simply shooting enemies instead of trying to use the drug against them.

Apart from being able to use Nectar you also have an array of weapons at your disposal these are all pretty much what you would expect from any shooter including shotguns, assault rifles and heavy machine guns. When fighting for the Promise Hand you are also able to set traps for the Mantel troops who are unable to spot them because of their Nectar dependence. If you find yourself out of bullets you can perform melee attacks and snatch an enemies weapons out his hands, however this feature is greatly under used throughout the game.

Haze was often billed as a platform defining game for the PS3, so it needed to make use of the consoles abilities including the six axis controller something many developers have failed to implement. Haze, however does make use of this feature, you shake the controller when you are set on fire by a flame thrower and for some reason this puts out the flames? As you can guess I was really impressed by this addition which to me is nothing more then a tacked on gimmick.

As is commonplace now in first person shooters, Haze features several vehicle sequences which are fairly extensive, however these are pretty unrewarding to play due to the linear paths you have to follow and the extremely unrealistic handling. Another annoyance is the constant need to switch vehicles because they are so easily damaged which only serves to drag out these long sequences further.

As with most modern shooters you are often teamed with squad members who serve to assist you on your mission, for the most part they prove to be quite useful, however they can be the cause of some annoyance as they will often get in your line of fire and block your path. Enemy AI is for the most part good! However, it is sometimes possible to catch them when they are standing still, seemingly watching walls. Another bad example of the games AI is that on several occasions enemy troops ran past me and then seemed to think I had disappeared and completely ignored me.

Despite several problems with the games AI, Haze does still offer a good challenge, although this is mainly due to the number of enemies that attack you at any one time and can make for pretty intense action. For me though these periods of action can be quite sparse as you will go through considerable sections of the game without a lot to do, this is something of a disappointment as these are some of the best parts of Haze. Another disappointment with the game is how short the campaign is, it can easily be completed within four to six hours despite some of the games levels being pretty long.

For me though the biggest disappointment with Haze comes from the games multiplayer support, not because it’s bad but because of how little of it there is. The game only supports three game types, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and a Team Assault game type. The games multiplayer modes have been done in pretty classic styling, with you playing as one of the two factions featured in the games campaign, picking up new weapons from the supply crates scattered around the game maps. Vehicles can be used in some of the maps, which is nice and adds to the fun factor but on the whole it’s disappointing considering what Infinity Ward have shown what can be achieved with Call of Duty 4.

Graphically Haze, looks good, environments are fairly varied and well detailed and character models look excellent and feature good animation, although they do seem to die in strange positions at times. The game runs pretty much bug free and at a good rate although their does seem to be a few issues with the games early cutscenes as they almost seem unfinished in parts. The games vehicles sequences look a little odd mainly due to the way they through up dust when moving over roads but fail to disturb water when you drive through it. The way they turn doesn’t look very realistic and on the whole vehicle sequences look a little dated.

Sound is probably one the games biggest weaknesses, music and sound effects are fine where the game really trips up is with the voice acting which is pretty extensive but simply put terrible especially in the cutscenes. Also it become very repetitive when travelling with a squad to hear the same couple of phrases said over and over, this becomes even more annoying when you fight for the Promise Hand and the rebels constantly shout “remember your promise to Merino”. It really makes you wish you could switch sides again and shoot them, it’s that annoying.

So is Haze the hyped up platform defining game we were lead to believe it would be? No it’s not, however it’s not a bad game putting in a pretty solid performance that should please most FPS fans, it is lacking a little replay value due to its small multiplayer support and short campaign. Not a bad game it just doesn’t live up to all the hype, so you maybe a little disappointed.