Haze

"Shambling through a Haze of mediocrity"

The short version: Haze has an annoying storyline which insults your intelligence, bland gameplay, bland everything else for that matter and is generally a big bottle of weaksauce so don't bother.

Now for the long version for those of you who actually read things: Haze is a game made by Free Radical Design a company founded by leading members of the team who made Goldeneye for Rareware all those years ago. Free Radical is probably known best for the Time Splitters series which has usually been favorably reviewed. Haze is also published by Ubisoft who are generally known for quality games, although frankly I think they've been slipping a bit the last few years. So with that history it wasn't completely unreasonable to expect something fairly good from Haze.

Ontop of that the game's release was really hyped out the ass, probably because for reasons completely unclear to me they decided to make it a PS3 exclusive and Sony is desperate as all hell to gain quality exclusives, although in this case I would say they once again shot themselves in the foot by pushing something far less than an A list title as a AAA list title and thereby annoying alot of people myself included. Now with all the background and industry politics explained it's time to talk about the game itself.

Haze begins with a speech by the protagonist Shane Carpenter about how he lives in the future and how there are wars in the future and how he has to set things right or something and that's why he's come halfway across the world to run around in a neon yellow suit and fight brown people in a jungle. Right from the start this hammed up bit of monologue is a pretty good indication of just how lame the rest of the Haze's storyline and writing is going to be. Then we find ourselves on an elevator getting to know our squad who spend the next five minutes or so eagerly demonstrating that they are a bunch of psychopathic tweakers before it's time to finally pile into a VTOL and go shoot something. Speaking of which one of my "buddies" told me to get into the aircraft and seeing as it had a big open door on the side I walked over and tried to enter it but was immediately rebuked by an invisible wall. After several seconds of trying various buttons and tactics in an attempt to enter the aircraft as the game had told me to do via the previously mentioned NPC and failing every time it cut to a non interactive section in which I entered the aircraft. This makes me wonder why the game didn't just cut to that the second I got anywhere near the aircraft rather than screwing with me, this occurs just a few minutes in and is a pretty good indication of just how half assed absolutely everything else is going to be in Haze.

First of all the story is just plain banal, it's got as much depth, insight and sophistication regarding the themes and issues it attempts to explore as an episode of Captain Planet and it's just as preachy and whiny too. You start off running through the jungle with your team of previously mentioned jackasses gunning down dozens of local guerrillas until you eventually capture their leader Marino who basically asks you why you're being such a dick to which Shane answers with confused mumbling before a fellow sergeant steps in and mercifully ends the awkward confrontation with some light beatings and dismemberment. On the way back to base Shane losses patience with his squad's increasingly naughty conduct sparking a shootout which causes the VTOL to crash and is then nursed back to health by Marino who manages to convince Shane in all of about two minutes of really annoying speech to switch sides. From there the game's story doesn't do jack diddly crap aside from continue to illustrate why Mantel Industries is bad, for all it's talk of moral courage, honor and ideology it sure is pretty unchallenging stuff. I mean they basically may as well have painted swastikas all over the Mantel troopers and showed them playing hacky sack with a sick puppy as a ball while Marino stands by more pure than the usual depictions of Jesus with a single tear rolling dramatically down his cheek.

Ironically they may have even gone so far as to get the opposite effect they were going for as it is, because the Mantel troopers are hilariously evil. They are like Snidely Whiplash tying Nell to the railroad tracks and twiddling his long mustachio evil, it's so over the top it can't be anything but funny. I remember two parts in particular, one involving vehicular manslaughter and a crushed pelvis and another which was a speech about "empty hands" that both had me laughing. Unfortunately the rebels are not funny, they have a general demeanor that made me want to slap them no matter how just their cause actually was. In the end the characterizations are simply so ridiculous and implausible it's impossible to take the story seriously under any circumstance.

As for Shane himself the reason I probably forgot to mention his character up until now is because he has none, and I mean none at all. Shane is a born follower, his most notable traits are being hypersensitive and slightly whiny. There was a point near the end of the game where it seemed like Shane was finally going to take a moral stand based on his own opinions, but fifteen seconds of Marino chastising him with one more annoying speech put an end to that and off Shane went to do one more thing he didn't want to do just because some jerk told him to do it in a firm voice.

Most games I would feel like I was telling you too much just by mentioning the changing sides thing, but Haze pretty much throws it's hand down the second you pick up the box because it gives it away on the back, hell they gave it away in the commercials and I am not joking if you put the controller down for ten seconds on the menu screen the demo will pop up and give it away. Beyond that there really is nothing to give away about the story.

The graphics and presentation follow the same pattern, it's one of those games that supposedly has "no loading screens" but that's a lie in the way it usually is, loading areas is usually "hidden" by making you ride in VTOL airplanes and helicopters without much in the way of windows. Usually someone else will be riding with you and these bits are used for storytelling or exposition. I remember late in the game though when I literally sat all alone in a helicopter for almost a minute staring at the bulkhead in silence without even so much as a voice on a radio. Laughably though some of these vehicles do have some really small slivers of window way up high on the sides, all you can see out of them though is the sky instantly change color as everything else goes through a painfully obvious clunk when the new area pops into existence outside. Haze is ugly too and half of it is that the graphics are ugly. It's not extremely ugly, but it has a certain kind of subpar look. It looks almost like someone finished this game three years ago for the 360 on a medium sized budget and then threw it in a closet until they arbitrarily dug it out again just recently.

The other half of the problem is the art direction is fairly hideous. The Mantel troopers, vehicles, areas and equipment have a palette which consists almost entirely of bumblebee yellow and a purplish black, and they light this stuff with dim tinted lighting like something you'd see in a really lame bachelor pad from the late 70's. The rest of the game takes place in the mud colored jungle, the other mud colored jungle, the muddy rust covered smelting plant, the rust covered boat full of the rust covered cargo containers on the mud colored jungle beach, a mud colored mountain, the gray dilapidated resort, the gray dilapidated research center, the mud colored village and the other mud colored jungle. Granted there are some cool looking things that happen when you're doing drugs, ODing or going through withdrawal but you're only going to to be doing that stuff in the first third of the game or so. Oh and for some reason Haze requires an installation in order to play it, I have absolutely no idea why the hell that's the case because it does not seem to gain anything from it.

I guess it's not fair to say that every game needs to have a million completely different environments, hell Half Life 2 for instance just takes place in crumbling chunks of unspecified Eastern Europe with bits of inter dimensional alien stuff laying around but there are two differences. First of all those environments were designed in a way as to be interesting to look at, secondly that game is good in every other aspect as opposed to how Haze is uniformly bland. The environments in Haze wouldn't be such an obvious problem if there was an awesome game happening in them which brings me to what is almost always the problem when a game isn't very good.

The gameplay is lacking, in this case we have a game that feels like it's design philosophy was mediocrity. It has two rifles both of which are seemingly identical aside from mag size and appearance, a pistol that might be alright if anyone ever dropped one, it has two shotguns with more or less the same issue as the rifles, it has an unimpressive sniper rifle you can pretty much never find, it has a flamethrower that rarely shows up and it has an extremely underwhelming rocket launcher that only appears when a helicopter or tank needs to die. You will spend the entire game with just the rifle,and you will rarely need anything else at all or stand to even gain by using anything else in most cases. Also it is only just a rifle, there are no secondary functions for any of the weapons at all. I don't think secondary modes are needed in every game or for every gun, but seriously an under slung grenade launcher could have added alot.

In addition to the first person shootings there's the typical vehicle sections all of which not surprisingly control very poorly, oh and the vehicles take damage over time and never last long enough to finish a section. The devs seemed to realize this though so whenever your vehicles start emitting the sounds that indicate they're about to explode (up until then it's very hard to gauge vehicle hp) you can just hop out and the game will spawn a brand new carbon copy of your now burning wreck of a vehicle a few dozen yards away. A few exceptions do exist, there was one time I got stranded on a road and had to hoof it for several minutes through completely empty terrain.

Each faction has it's own unique abilities, Mantel troops can pop nectar (the weird drug they use) which causes them to see the rebels lit up like big glowing targets and using nectar also makes them about as tough and aggressive as a grizzly bear on pcp. Rebels can bury grenades in the ground with their hands to make mines (something that looks extremely strange when you're do it on concrete or metal floors) which would be a great ability if you actually spent much time defending or ambushing rather than running stupidly forward absolutely constantly. There is one small area near the end where you're given the opportunity to set up before your position is attacked and occasionally you'll see an APC or something coming and have time to set a mine. Usually though it's pretty pointless because like I said most of the game is just a big brainless charge forward even when you're playing as the side who's supposed to be sneaky. Rebels can also steal guns out of people's hands, somehow turn any dropped ammo into ammo for the weapon they're carrying (how you put a pistol round in a shotgun and have it work is beyond me) and feign death.....as many times as they want.

Feigning death in Haze is even more of a get out of anything free button than it is in WoW (where it has a cooldown and a chance to fail) or Army of Two (in which it only works once against any one enemy) and is so absurdly overpowered it's not even funny. Any time after you become a rebel and you start taking too much damage just press the button and boom everyone leaves you alone and you can regain your health at your leisure and you really can just do this as often as you want. The explanation for this in the story is that apparently in addition to all it's other magical effects necter posesses it also makes troopers totally unable to see corpses because I guess seeing corpses is depressing or something. At first I was pleased to know there was an actual explanation for why the corpses had been vanishing into thin air right before me all the time, but while it was less obvious and the game tried to hide it better I still saw a few corpses vanish when I was a rebel too so yeah whatever, seems more to me like they were just sweeping a design problem under the rug and making dumb excuses.

The final ability rebels have is to make "nectar grenades" which basically create a cloud that causes any Mantel trooper within to OD, I talked about ODing on nectar briefly earlier and it is kind of an interesting mechanic. Troopers can be made to OD by hitting them with such a grenade or by shooting them in the glowing target in the back of their neck (great armor design huh?) and when they OD they turn red and run around firing constantly at everything and anything friend or foe. It's certainly an interesting effect when it happens to you, and it is moderately useful to do to someone else.

You'll also get AI squadmates, and they are bashing the square peg against the round hole stupid and seem to adore standing next to things that explode. First of all no NPC friendly or hostile ever seems to gain any advantage from their faction specific abilities, or even really use them for that matter. First part of the game will be about a small group of near invincible Mantel troopers including yourself running around gunning down endless really weak rebels, second part a small group of near invincible rebels including yourself running around and gunning down endless really weak Troopers. Despite the fact that the rebels mostly just wear normal albeit utterly tacky clothing and the Mantel troops wear head to toe armor the only real factor in how much damage anyone can take seems to be entirely whether they have Shane Carpenter on their side, no wonder Marino wanted to bring him over.

No matter what side you're on your allies seem to have been programmed with one single all important directive, that is to annoy you. They CONSTANTLY run in front of you when you're shooting and then cry about getting shot, and they CONSTANTLY say the same dumb things over and over and over and over and over. Halo 3 for the purpose of contrast had thousands of voice clips for NPCs to say, Haze seems to have a couple dozen at most. Once you go rebel you will be reminded every ten seconds to "Remember your promise to Marino!", and after the first twenty times you'll want to forget that promise just to spite the walking broken records who are your squadmates. The Mantel troopers are just as bad, but at least they occasionally say something funny.

There's also a multiplayer mode but I didn't play it, because I don't have a wireless router and in their infinite wisdom Sony decided not to put in a jack for me to insert a cable. Nor am I interested in getting a wireless router when I live in an apartment building filled with college students. In any case it's probably like everything else, totally bland. Seeing as even people who only have the PS3 still have access to Call of Duty 4 there would be no reason to bother in any case. There's also an online co-op, which I hear adds a fair bit of enjoyment but I didn't have the chance to look at it for previously mentioned reasons and I am not renting Haze again.

In conclusion the game is bland, lame and not very fun to play whatsoever. Don't buy it even if you are someone who only has a PS3 and is starved for titles, go buy Bioshock instead because that's a good game. You know the funny thing is that while Haze isn't a totally unplayable wreck and I've played alot of less than stellar games recently unlike those others there was nothing about Haze I found appealing. As broken as say Alone in the Dark was I was often able to dig underneath the bad design and briefly glimpse the awesome game that could have been, Haze on the other hand is just totally unimpressive and more importantly uninteresting too. As for all the moral and ethical crap touched on in the storyline don't worry about that stuff because Shane should have just had the good sense to stay in school so he could have graduated and gotten a job that payed better, didn't require him to take psychotropic drugs or travel halfway around the world to get shot at, that's the moral I'm taking with me anyway.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/21/08, Updated 08/22/08

Game Release: Haze (US, 05/20/08)