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Why Haze Is a Piece of Rubbish and No One Should Buy It (An Objective and Impartial Review)

posted by Mark Fujii at 10:00 pm.

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Haze was supposed to be the next big exclusive title for the Playstation 3. After all, it was being made by Free Radical, the developers behind the awesome Timesplitters franchise and, of course, Goldeneye and Perfect for the Nintendo 64. They certainly have the pedigree of excellence, and gamers have been eagerly waiting to see what Free Radical would do with the technological prowess of the Playstation 3. Apparently, if Haze is any indication, the technological power of the Playstation 3 can go screw itself because it hasn’t amounted to a whole lot.

In short, Haze is officially the first huge disappointment of 2008. It fails as a game on so many different levels, and the worst thing is, it’s almost as if the plethora of glaring flaws marring Haze were intentional. At a variety of points I can identify where, if the developers had just left well enough alone, Haze would rest peacefully on the plateau of mediocrity. It would certainly be no Game of the Year, but at least it wouldn’t make me weep in my sleep about its wasted potential. Instead, Free Radical poked and prodded Haze mercilessly with stupid design decisions until the game finally fell off the cliffs of average and face planted horribly in a steaming pile of crap.

That’s how bad Haze is. It’s almost as bad as that last analogy.

From a graphical stand point the game looks like rubbish. Character models look muddy, textures are bland, and the graphics glitch periodically with comrades appearing and reappearing at a whim like some low budget Playstation 2 game. Whenever you’re not fighting in the jungle (which actually looks decent) the environments look like crap too. At times, if not for the special effects and periodic good looking explosion, Haze could probably pass off as a good looking Playstation 2 game .

However a crap looking game doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad game though usually it’s a pretty good indication. Haze plays about as badly as it looks. From start to finish, the game is incredibly generic. Find guns, shoot people, go from one bland, uninspired linear objective to the next. Hurray! The computer AI is atrocious with enemies standing mindlessly around, begging for you to shoot them, and your comrades were apparently educated in the same school of stupid because they do the same damn thing.

The game does support four player co-op and a slew of online gaming options (you can also add computer controlled opponents) too which is a nice inclusion, but honestly, I can’t think of a reason why anyone would want to play this to begin with.

There is the concept of Nectar which is Free Radical’s vain effort at trying to keep Haze from being just another cookie cutter shooting game. Basically, it’s a chemical that makes you go crazy and lets you special abilities. Sort of like using “primal” powers in Far Cry for Xbox 360, only Nectar isn’t incorporated half as well. Instead of Nectar making you feel like a complete badass of Sylvester Stallone proportion, it just made me feel like a cheap bastard. It just allows you to circumvent the game’s horrible AI, making it permissible to take advantage of your powers to effortlessly pick off the opposition without any real danger to yourself. It also makes the game incredibly easy. While walking around with a big stick may seem like an attractive proposition, it becomes substantially less so when your enemies are so mentally challenged that sitting around and patiently waiting for you to euthanize them is their only form of resistance.

Don’t expect anything from the story line either. Despite being one of the key selling features of Haze, the story is ridiculously bad, and worst, pretends to be intellectual and profound with philosophical psychobabble about morality, life, death, and war thrown in for some confusing reason because its pointless, boring, and is just plain stupid. It tries so hard to be deep, but at the end of the day, it comes off as being pretentious and distracting. The basic storyline premise is this: you’re a Mantle soldier (essentially a complete heartless, child punching, no pants wearing, steroid pumped jerks with a gun who takes drugs) but then discover the light and become a rebel. That’s not even a spoiler or a plot twist either. Throughout the game you also have to endure some of the worst writing ever in a video game. Dialog is over dramatic and cliché. Your comrades spout the stupidest one-liners and phrases. I don’t know if Free Radical was desperately trying to tap into the awesomeness of 80’s action movies or something, but far from eliciting high fives and manly grunts from the audience whenever they’re spoken, it’s more likely to cause groans of annoyance.

Haze’s largest crime (aside from the aforementioned laundry list of flaws) is being so disappointing for being made by a company that helped define the FPS genre on consoles. They made Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, titles which are almost a decade old and yet still are more enjoyable to play than Haze. Maybe if Haze wasn’t made by such a prestigious developer I wouldn’t be so disappointed and mad at how lackluster and terrible Haze is, but I am. Free Radical has a reputation to live up to, and their first FPS on the Playstation 3 wasn’t supposed to be junk.

Think of it this way if you will. You have two children. One who sits in the front of the class and the other who sits in the corner with a big dunce cap on their head. If the latter child were to bring home a F on their report card, you’d probably sigh and remember that this was one of the reasons you had turned to alcoholism, but that’s pretty much it. Now, if the former child were to return home with a F, you’d be shocked and horrified, beat them and reassure them that you don’t love them anymore. It all boils down to expectations. Like it or not, they’re always present, and if you set the precedence of exellence, you’d better live up to it.

We can only hope that the upcoming Timesplitters 4 (also made by Free Radical) isn’t as bad as Haze. But then again, Timesplitters has ninja monkeys. We can only assume the best.

Yes. You read that right. Ninja monkeys.

Mark Fujii: I'm your typical college student who plays too much video games. I also work as an electronic sales associate, meaning I sell Ipods and violent video games to your children when not trying to sneak off and play Super Smash Bros while the boss isn't looking. Oh, and I'm totally awesome. True fact.