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After some of the largest hype seen in gaming history, Haze has finally landed on the PS3. The important question is whether Haze is everything it’s cracked up to be.   When we played through the demo, we were fairly impressed; it felt solid and well paced, which is important as it can completely destroy a good shooter. Then rumours arose, one being that the demo was the build shown at E3 back in 2006. This had a positive effect, upping the excitement factor with the view that if the demo was old, the finished product would obviously be better. Unfortunately, the demo was taken from a ‘gold’ level, but despite that we were sincerely impressed with the feel of Haze. Sadly that feeling was not to be carried through the full game.

Haze’s base idea sounds staggering, a sure innovation in gameplay; Nectar, but things just seem to fall away after the concept stage. The developer potential was there, Free Radical’s majestic Timesplitters as its fame. There is so much missing from Haze that it makes you wonder what it could have been. Despite that, there is plenty to love about Haze and it’s genuinely fun to play, but the crux is it isn’t what people have come to expect from the creators of Timesplitters.

Haze’s beginning holds some of its best gameplay. You start off as fresh faced, Sergeant Shane Carpenter, who has joined up with Mantel’s PMC (Private Military Company) to become a hero, fighting the good fight. Mantel is a multinational pharmaceutical and in particular Nectar. Nectar‘s a drug that’s opposite to reality, in the way that it makes the user faster, quicker to react and harder skinned. It’s no secret so don’t cry ‘spoiler’, but Shane, an hour into the game, decides that Mantel’s war against the rebels (called the Promised Hand) is flawed, subsequently changing sides to aid the rebels and their wet-drip of a leader, Merino. The story appears to move along at a breakneck pace, but Haze can enter ‘plodding speed’ at times.

During your short stint as a Mantel soldier, you’ll gorge yourself on Nectar. You get six shots, but waiting a while, taking from your teammates or killing restores your pool. It makes Shane quicker and stronger, that you’ll end up feeling like a death-blossom in yellow and black spandex. Its experience is akin to Rambo on Speed and actually works as a gameplay mechanic. You’ll feel the Nectar coursing through your veins with increased reaction time and improved vision. Sadly Nectar is ripped away from you before you can have fun. This is a major cripple, as it removes much of the unique interest that Haze had in its gameplay. As well as the advantages of Nectar, Mantel uses the drug to control its soldiers changing how they perceive the world. Nectar stops soldiers seeing death; the effects of war.

After Carpenter joins the Rebel forces (and your Nectar has been taken away), things turn predominately sour with Haze descending into the realms of ‘just another shooter’. The rebels’ abilities do make them standout but it’s nothing that would make you prefer being a rebel rather than a Mantel Trooper. There are three flavours. The first while nothing compared to Nectar’s increased speed and reaction time, is similar. You can perform a quick roll by double tapping X while holding the direction on the stick. This can be useful but also horribly limiting, due to the fact that you can only roll along a set axis, back, forward, left and right. The second is something that I personally only used a handful of times as it is just easier to steal the weapons off dead Mantel soldiers. The rebels can convert any clip from any weapon into ammo useable for the weapon that you are carrying. The final trick up the rebels’ proverbial sleeve is two pronged, the first is that you can equip a knife and if you’re near a downed Mantel soldier drip the blade in Nectar and either melee another trooper up close or throw it causing them to overdose on Nectar, making them go into ‘overdrive’. Mantel Troopers, if overdosed on Nectar, will just start shooting at anything and anyone meaning they will start shooting their comrades before dying themselves. The second part works on the same idea, but attaches to a normal frag grenade, saving you ammo and time.

It isn’t only the rebel gameplay that falls flat, the graphics join in. As Mantel, the world seems vibrant and colourful but when viewed from a rebel point of view, it’s almost as if the colour palette was used up for the Mantel section, leaving only dark, dull colours for the rebel sections. That said, the character models do look great but as always, in FPS’ the main characters fair the best. Grunts that are eliminated seem to come from the clone bank. There are about three different types of enemies in the game; though there’re usually varied in subtle ways. The majority of difference is hairstyle / colour, or added accessories, like shades or glasses.

It’s not all bad as it seems that the online play is Haze’s saving grace. The versus mode works almost perfectly, offering you three game types, the first two are your standard team / single deathmatch. The third mode is something that has been seen before but implemented in a unique way. Team Assault boils down to an ‘objective game,’ where you are tasked with a certain mission to complete, normally along the lines of stopping the enemy force from controlling an area. In Haze the objectives are completely random; so far the best being the need to take control of a massive missile launcher, based on the back of a truck, then drive the lorry ‘of death’ to your launch pad to win the game. This of course leads to mass sniper battles. The other mission was something more typical, the objective being one player needing to become the leader of the rebels, (through some cunningly placed lockers), then escape the Mantel forces. This was made more interesting by the inclusion of a safe house in the centre of the map, which worked as a spawn point if captured.

But the competitive online play, pales in comparison to the fantastic online / split screen offline co-op. This works in a similar way to Gears of War but adds so much more depth to it. There’s a limit of four in your squad, but the gameplay changes 360 degrees by adding human players. The idea of the game is of course the same as the single player but the co-op action makes things much more frantic.

The saddest thing about Haze is that if the game hadn’t received so much hype and media attention, then half of the problems that have appeared in the game wouldn’t have been such as issue. But because of the hype and expectation of Free Radical, Haze becomes a thorn in the side of an otherwise pretty good portfolio. Haze seems to have failed through the singular reason that it simply missed the boat, if it had come out before Call of Duty 4 it would have done just fine. We’ve got to give it a generous 7.

Score: 7/10

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