Haze (PlayStation 3)

The game’s campaign lasts 6-8 hours and you can play on or offline with a friend, through pretty mediocre to decent level designs. I spent most of my time in Assault mode and even that wore thin after a while, two sides aren’t exactly balanced and whilst the Mantel guys can use nectar to boost their performance, the Promised Hand rebels are left with inflicting overdoses on Mantel troopers, laying traps and playing dead.

The problems don’t stop there, the game has some badly implemented objective markers and waypoints, they leave you wondering what to do and I often wonder if developers do this on purpose to try and eke out some more hours of playtime from a title that’s way too short in the first place. As previously mentioned the AI of your squadmates is questionable in singleplayer and they often do stupid things, like running into your field of fire and getting in your way.

As a PS3 exclusive, with no excuse to blame bad design and graphics on anything but the developers, Haze walks smack bang into the bar of lack-lustre design and orders a drink whilst chatting up the ugliest texture hooker in the joint. Seriously, the PS3 is a good machine; it has great graphics (just look at Metal Gear Solid 4) and deserves better treatment than being in bed with developers who just leave in the morning.

Haze deserves some marks for being an average FPS on reflection, perhaps earlier I might have been a little harsh when I said terrible game. I mean it does have co-op play and you can enjoy some parts of it, when you’re not being assailed by laughable dialogue and overly melodramatic voice acting with about as much passion as a dead stoat locked in a cooler. It’s below average at best and without the decent online multiplayer I’d have been tempted to score this one lower than I did.

If you ignore my rant and look at the game, seeing the wood for the trees, it’s possible to pick out some of the better parts, it’s just that the good parts are overshadowed by the awful parts and whilst you might have some different/cool abilities for your soldiers on both sides of the fence and be able to convince your friends to play with you on assault and generally romp through the game in the aforementioned time together. It’s not quite enough to lift the pall of mediocre that surrounds the game for me. You might have a better experience and be one of the few out there that actually really likes Haze.

I would expect so much more from a PS3 exclusive and especially one that’s been hyped up quite a bit. To listen to the developer interviews on Gametrailers and the like, really pumps you up, like the Mantel troopers themselves, but when it comes down to it, the pump is just full of a lot of hot air and once again we’ve been built up to such an extent that when the game finally arrived we’d already played Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 and after Call of Duty 4 I’m afraid Haze didn’t stand a chance, it was already dead and buried unless it could seriously top that.

Better luck next time Free Radical Design, you best not ruin the next Timesplitters.