Haze review (PS3)

Editor's note: Our apologies for a late review here. The Royal Mail took over a month to deliver the review code sent to us by Ubisoft in May.

I crashed my car on Friday. I was happily driving along the M11, started to brake with the flow of traffic, and one of my wheels locked, I started skidding, spinning and smashed into a lorry. My expensive full RAC coverage wouldn’t pay to tow my car back home since there was a crash involved rather than just a mechanical breakdown, despite that being the cause. As I was on my way home in the expensive tow truck one of my cast members for the sitcom I am shooting contacted me to tell me that he wouldn’t be able to get hold of his costume for the next day’s shoot and as I was on the phone discovering the excess on my insurance was £550 our review copy of Haze popped through my door. It didn’t stand a chance.

To be fair, all of those events didn’t affect my judgement of the game; it could have been the one gem that lit up my weekend and cheered me into escapism from a pretty poor day. Hugely hyped (until the reviews started coming in), Haze comes from the developer of the TimeSplitters series, so we were expecting something rather tasty in this next-gen effort. In fact what we’ve ended up with is a slightly generic First Person Shooter that makes some good attempts at progressing the genre, but forgets to focus on making it fun.

Those live-action promos

Remember back when Free Radical waz plugging the hell out of the game, showing fake adverts for Mantle and some beautifully shot live action trailers? Well that kind of sets the theme for the game. Indeed you’ll start as as soldier working for Mantel. Hyped up on the performance enhancing drug Nectar you’ll learn how to use it, what benefits you will receive from it, and you’ll really start to get a feel for how it will help you in future battles.

Then all too quickly you switch sides, lose your practised abilities and gain a whole new set as the rebels fighting against the morally ambiguous Mantel. Based upon a similar overall concept to Metal Gear Solid’s emotion restraint idea, the Nectar gives the soldiers a distorted view of the battlefield meant to increase their confidence and battle ability. In this way, you can play dead and disappear from their sights, only to jump out and catch them unaware later. Don’t go trying the MGS stealth gameplay though since you’ll have a squad of troops with you for most of the time, and they won’t be hiding.

Other features

It is a shame that you don’t get as long as you might like with the Mantel skills, but it is long enough to get a feel for the abilities and exploit them when you become a rebel, even so far as causing soldiers to overdose and wildly shoot anyone in view. Both sides have their advantages, again well used by the team based multiplayer modes. One in particular, the Team Assault mode which gives various objectives for each side and awards players for certain achievements. An effort has definitely been made to use the concepts to their full potential from design.

Equally, as promised you won’t see any loading screens (aside from when starting the game for the first time and installing the data, or if you die), which fits in so well that it generally goes by unnoticed. Loads are obviously masked by transport sections, but there is dialogue to entertain you while waiting. I also found great pleasure in the four player online Coop. Jacking the difficulty up to the highest mode and slogging through with three other players gets very satisfying if you’re up for the challenge. You can play with two players locally, and the drop in/drop out gameplay leads to some generally full games. That said, I’m unsure why throughout the game, if someone is shot to near death, tapping them on the shoulder brings them back up to perfect health.

So why isn’t it a 10?

It seems sad that so many little things are wrong with the game when such an obvious amount of effort has been put into pushing it as the next big thing. The friendly AI is very frustrating, repeatedly running in front of you while you’re zoomed in, unloading rounds into enemies. Even when you are taught to plant mines to avert an oncoming enemy invasion my friends ran down into the very same area straight away and triggered a couple of my mines. Almost immediately after the game suggests that you try sniping while using Nectar (through a text pop up, rather than another character suggesting it) you’ll see a few enemies up ahead loading boxes. The game wants me to snipe them, I thought. Instead they must be surrounded by an invisible magic box of protection that only drops when they’ve finished or noticed you.

A similar invisible bounding box event often occurs when a vehicle is to be dropped in or supplied to you. The game keeps you away from it for seconds after it has come to a stop, perhaps originally to avoid you being crushed, but it honestly feels like poor technical level design. In the same way, one of the (rarely used) game mechanics is the ability to melee a door off its hinges. Some doors can be opened like this, some can’t. Most of them can’t be told apart, and in fact one door that previously couldn’t be smashed off its hinges is in fact waiting for one of your teammates to arrive to do it for you.

Technical merits and issues

A rare occurrence of texture pop up is well masked by the more detailed versions of textures fading in, (although some textures can look very low detailed at some points) and some of the explosions and smoke plume effects are fantastic, however they seem to vary tremendously in quality unfortunately giving the game’s climax a wholly low budget feel. More level design factors that really should have been spotted include a vehicle that floats above the ground (and isn’t supposed to) and a confusingly designed final level that made me restart from my last checkpoint the first time I played it since I thought a bug had halted my progress.

While the story and theme of the game doesn’t exactly allow for much variety the game ended up boring me with waves of the same enemies. There are essentially three types of Nectar soldier, a couple of turrets and some dropships to defeat throughout the entire game. I’ve missed the Unreal-esque worlds of plentiful varying enemy types, and as many modern games have used the upgrade in technology to try and give us more realistic humans we seem to have had a lot of them recently.

Don’t be too hard

Certain things I can (just about) forgive the game for. During an on rails shooting section towards the end of the game you must take out turrets on both sides of a large target. You’ll be driving along one side, and immediately when the turrets are destroyed you’ll teleport to the other side of the target. Many have had issue with the jock-style dialogue from the soldiers, and while the repetitive comments (for the last time, no I won’t forget my promise) grate on you after a while, the tone of the dialogue seems to fit in with the pumped up on Nectar arrogant soldier attitude.

The story begins to touch on whether either side of the conflict is actually correct, but while it tries to tease you admirably you never have a choice over what you actually do. By the end of the game I ended up hating both sides, which was perhaps the intention, but I wanted to be able to play the game my way. Any worrying over the moral choices you have made should be down to what route you as a player have decided to do, not what the developer has made you decide to do. Ultimately Haze is fun to play through, especially in the hardest coop mode, but misses the mark on so many other aspects that I find it very hard to recommend the game above the many others on the market right now above a bargain bin purchase to enjoy battling through with you friends.