games: Haze

Fancy a bit of biological enhancement with your military FPS? Well join me as we take a look at Ubisoft’s recent PS3 exclusive, Haze.

You play Shane Carpenter, a soldier for private military corporation Mantel, whose unit is sent to Boa in South America to quell an insurgency led by an apparently evil genocidal dictator nicknamed Skin Coat after his penchant for wearing the skins of his victims.

Aside from the usual bevvy of guns and grenades, the Mantel soldier’s edge comes from Nectar. He is a bio-medical stimulant who enhances your senses, your speed and strength and your body’s resistance for a short time, a sort of sci-fi version of PCP! It’s not quite as intricate as the Crysis suit, but it does add an extra dimension to combat, as well as to the plot. You need to ration your doses as your stocks replenish slowly, and if you OD you get twitchy with impaired vision, control and aim, and Carpenter will start to shoot randomly of his own accord. Part way through, you will start to experience problems with your Nectar administrator, which will also mess you up quite a bit.

Eventually you and your pain in the ass, meat-head team, capture Skin Coat and you realize that things are not quite what the Mantel propaganda machine has led you to believe.

So far, so good, so why has Haze been panned by so many critics?

Well, despite some sweet plot, gameplay concepts and good design, the execution leaves a somewhat sour taste in the mouth. The graphics are pretty damn clunky for a game that claims as much as this one does, and so the good design work you see in the locations, the armour and the vehicles are let down and the whole thing looks really dated. Combat also feels pretty light - skirmishes aren’t fantastically designed and you are pitted against some very weak AI. I mean seriously, I ran into a room and missed the dude by the door. He snuck up behind me and hit me in the back, but rather than hit me again and actually take me out, before I could even turn round he’d run out of the room and given me a clean line of fire. This is matched by the stupidity of your team mates who will frequently run in front of your gun.

But apart from poor mechanics, including the horrifically embarrassing six-axis control for putting out flames, the real problem Haze suffers from is that its cool plot twisting is executed in such a way that really shoots itself in the head. It’s only half way through the game when you switch sides and really learn about Nectar that you realize that a lot of the things you thought were flaws were intended to be there as part of the game. Remember how dead bodies disappeared like it was 1981? Well, that’s not shitty graphics, it’s a sinister effect of Nectar, blinding soldiers to the horrors of war so they can kill without question. This is actually a very cool moment of realization and good use of video game technology as a story telling medium, but a lot of people won’t stick with the game long enough to find this out. Similarly, you are supposed to dislike your fellow Mantel soldiers, but while in story terms serving alongside pricks leads nicely into your defection, when playing a game it is likely to just make you put down the controller. Also the script takes these brave and exciting plot ideas and ploughs through them with all the subtlety of a picture book. Mantel could have been a sinister force, but it’s troops just come out like bad caricatures.

That said, even with this hamfisted approach, the scenes where you switch are very well done. After your Mantel ship crashes into a swamp, you are left without objective, but with full control of your character for a good few minutes while you hear flashbacks of your experience so far and radio chatter from Mantel. Wandering around aimlessly in this murky environment is a very good mimic for Carpenter’s disorientation, and I suddenly became very impressed with the game. The poor graphics will pull you back from this, but even so, once you switch sides, with a new HUD and no Nectar, the first time you are asked to turn against your former team mates should make you feel a little uncomfortable.

In conclusion, Haze as an overall experience doesn’t live up to the high expectations we had of it. In terms of gameplay and graphics, it definitely suffers from being in a genre already glutted with very high quality examples and so ends up feeling dated. However, there are some commendable and interesting elements that it would be sad to overlook. I’d give this 3 stars.

For the best of the rest:

Metacritic:
Twenty-five years in the future. Governments have outsourced military operations to private multinational corporations. As Jake Carpenter, a newly enlisted soldier in the Mantel army, you are seeking fulfillment and thrills by fighting for a good cause. Thanks to their high-tech arsenal of vehicles, deadly weaponry, and performance enhancing bio-medical support, the Mantel Corporation’s ruthlessly efficient soldiers are the most feared by terrorists, dictators, and the corporation’s political enemies. Your conflict begins in a war-torn country in South America, where you have been sent to fight a vicious rebel faction, The Promise Hand. At first glance, all is well, but things quickly begin to look a little strange… State of the art multiplayer modes Fire up your console or PC for online battles on one of two carefully balanced sides. Choose from a variety of online modes including furious co-op action with your friends!

Gamespot:
If you played any given 10-minute chunk of Haze, depending on what part of this futuristic first-person shooter you chose, you would be convinced that it was either incredibly exciting or simply dreadful. Dim-witted artificial intelligence and deeply embarrassing storytelling are mixed with some breathtaking action sequences and thoughtful map design into an awkward and messy hodgepodge of shooting and driving that alternates between the entertaining and the downright unpleasant. It’s fitting that Haze’s gameplay would embrace such extremes, because its entire fiction is built around shallow absolutes. One faction embodies unlikeable and unredeeming lowbrow sensibilities without a hint of irony; the other embraces its ethical, sympathetic cause with angelically high morals. This is a shooter both easy to love and easy to hate, and you’ll probably find yourself feeling both emotions within moments of each other.

IGN:
Sometimes, making a name for yourself with a particular genre or subject can come back to bite you. It’s more than likely that not every single title you make will live up to this particular reputation, and the ones that are far off the mark will appear as a large albatross on an otherwise sterling record. Haze is such a burden placed on the otherwise acclaimed development team at Free Radical, whose many employees have worked on GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, not to mention establishing its acclaimed TimeSplitters franchise. While Free Radical’s previous work was quite excellent, Haze is anything but, coming across as a middling, generic first-person shooter with bland visuals, a weak plot and laughable characters.