The premise behind Haze is actually interesting enough on its own to at least give the game a right to exist among the other FPS's available. Some games have unique weapons and some include twists such as time manipulation or are period pieces, but no matter what, each one of them has some sort of 'hook' that is designed to make you stop and go notice that something different is going on. Haze's hook is Nectar, a performance enhancing drug that is given to the soldiers of Mantel to use while they are in combat, which heightens their senses, allowing you to see enemies highlighted from a distance despite being surrounded in shrubbery that would normally camouflage them, as well as making your defenses better, among other things. Of course, every drug has its side effects, and after using Nectar for a while, it starts playing tricks on you and malfunctioning within your system, which is where the main narrative kicks in. The questioning of what Nectar is really doing to people on a wider scale is the focus here, and as you progress through the game, all sorts of twists and turns will take place as you get closer to discovering the horrible (and somewhat predictable) truth.
"What!? You think our helmets are generic!? ATTACK!!"
It's not a terrible story by any means, but where Haze trips, stumbles and falls flat on its helmet-covered face is in the actual delivery of said story. There are no 'cut-scenes' of any kind, at least not in the traditional sense. The closest you'll get to a cut-scene is when your character has a conversation with another character, still from the first person perspective. This means that the twists and turns which could normally have worked very well are hidden away in a sea of what seems like never-ending dialogue, made all the more difficult by the voice-acting being sub-par in terms of quality. The characters in the game also come off as a little too preachy, as if they're consistently lecturing you on the horrors of the world and where that places you as the main character. It feels like the writers of this story had a whole lot to say, but we just wish they'd chosen their words more carefully rather than forcing us to listen to characters ranting about the struggles of society.
Of course, it's not all about the story. Haze is a FPS, and is very generic in its execution. Apart from the aforementioned Nectar having a direct impact on a couple of your skills as a soldier, the gameplay is a linear 'go into this area, kill everyone, go to the next area, kill everyone again' style of formula, and it can get quite monotonous. Charging yourself up with Nectar is as simple as pressing the L2 button, but if you inject too much into yourself, you'll react to the overdose by losing control of your character temporarily as you shoot your weapon sporadically and generally run around like a madman. This super-drug of sorts makes you almost indestructible when in combat with the enemy, so you should have no trouble progressing through the game until the point where - shock horror - the story takes a turn and you're left to fight without the use of Nectar at all. Yes, you read that correctly: the main hook of the game is being able to use Nectar, and then mid-way through, you're left to fight without it for the rest of the experience. While we can understand why the decision was made to progress the storyline, it leaves you with yet another standard shooter that's far from unique.
Nectar: Make the most of it.
Sure, you'll get some different-ish weapons to use such as Nectar-grenades designed to make your enemies go crazy and shoot each other and the ability to plant grenades in the ground as landmines, but for the most part you'll just be shooting a lot of bad guys over and over again until the credits roll. This is made all the more frustrating by the AI, or more appropriately, the lack of AI. Enemies have no cohesion, will stand out in the open waiting for you to shoot them, and often won't back up their soldier buddies even though they were killed mere metres away only a millisecond ago. They will sometimes run right up to you and then do a 180 to go in the opposite direction for no apparent reason, and will even run right past you at times despite the fact that you are trying to shoot them in the face. The squad that's supposed to back you up isn't much better; expect them to run into landmines and dive right in the middle of a skirmish with a pile of enemies, leaving them downed and waiting for you to revive them because they can't revive each other.
Thankfully, your team is basically expendable, and new squad members will likely join you at every single checkpoint to make up for your losses - but this raises another problem with Haze, which is that you're never really challenged. Enemies are stupid enough to never take advantage of a bad situation you may find yourself stuck in, and most gamers should find themselves breezing through quite easily. The only time we found ourselves getting killed was when an enemy soldier jumped from around a corner and promptly used a shotgun to take us down in one shot, or when a not-so-friendly turret was placed just out of sight from our weapon, defeating us before we could blink. Normally when a game beats you, you accept it and try to think of how you will overcome the obstacle next time, but when Haze gets the better of you, it honestly just feels cheap. Then there are the vehicle segments of the game, and the less that's said about those, the better. Clunky, simplistic and terribly frustrating to control, one driving section would have been enough... but of course there's a few of them littered throughout, supposedly to break up the monotony of a whole heap of shooting.
"Come on guys, I thought we agreed on RED Helmet Wednesdays!"
Alas, while it does have some glaring problems, Haze does actually have some redeeming features, and these come in the form of multiplayer modes, both competitive and cooperative. You can play through the entire campaign online with up to three other people, which does make the whole thing much more entertaining than it is in reality. It's actually a testament to social gaming in general that playing this game with friends makes it fun, because you'll probably be chatting away too much to realise that it's all very predictable and uninspired. There's also 16-player competitive multiplayer online, and while fun for a brief period, surely won't hold the interest for very long when there are much deeper online alternatives already available.
We're getting to a stage with the PlayStation 3 where we know that games can look fantastic, and it's basically expected. Again, it really is a shame, but Haze just doesn't look technically impressive. The texturing is average at best and often doesn't load properly, leaving some surfaces looking unfinished and... well, texture-less. Pop-up occurs constantly, with plants and trees appearing before your very eyes, combined with some painfully obvious clipping issues between characters and their environments. With the amount of time and money spent on this game, it's incredibly disappointing that these issues are so frequent. The sound is annoying on an entirely new level, too; we mentioned that the voice acting was sub-par, and we weren't kidding, as this even translates to the dialogue of your squad-mates throughout the entire experience. Every few seconds, expect them to yell something random, and then yell it repeatedly up until the point you are literally screaming back at your TV screen for them to stop.
With some serious technical issues and some odd design choices including a narrative that clearly thinks it's far more interesting and deep than it actually is, Haze is certainly a step backwards for the FPS genre. What makes this entire situation all the more disappointing is that Free Radical have proven themselves time and time again as developers that really know how to make shooters work, and work well. Even though we've been incredibly judgmental of Haze in this review, we should note that it's certainly not the worst game we've ever played; it does have some redeeming features in the form of multiplayer, there are a couple of decent ideas and the actual core 'shoot people a lot' gameplay certainly isn't broken, rather just generic and predictable. If you're completely starved for a new shooting game on the PS3, then Haze might be worth checking out, but make sure to proceed with caution when doing so.
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