ow I know what it feels like to be a junkie going through withdrawal. Though the drug Nectar hardly makes Haze a good game, when Free Radical takes it away a quarter of the way through, the game world suddenly feels barren, and you long for one last hit to make the drab experience mildly interesting again. So much for Haze being a killer app for the PS3.
The year is 2023, and Shane Carpenter is the newest numbskull to join the ranks of Mantel Corporation, a multinational biotech company that fields its own army. Their secret weapon is Nectar, a supplement that gives soldiers increased fighting skills and a euphoric high that prevents them from experiencing PTSD. The resulting army is composed of overconfident frat boy ‘roid freaks who wouldn’t be out of place chilling with Brucie in GTA IV. Between high fives and fist pumps, these tools indiscriminately smoke anyone who gets in their way. Carpenter isn’t as enamored with the drugs and propaganda as the rest of Mantel, and after he bears witness to his fellow soldiers torturing a resistance leader, a series of events leads him to switch sides to the Promise Hand, a revolutionary insurgency fighting the occupying Mantel forces whose own end goals are never really expressed.
Ludicrous story aside, Haze is littered with inexcusable gameplay flaws. More often than not the game lacks a waypoint system or intelligent pathfinding to naturally direct you to objectives, which means you waste a lot of time searching for where you should be going. This is especially amplified in maps that force you to backtrack over previously cleared areas.
On the battlefield, Nectar is a powerful tool. Inject the ideal amount and it increases your speed, accuracy, and awareness, highlighting enemies in bright orange. If you take too large a dose or your Nectar tank explodes, however, your character will go berserk, shooting anyone in his crosshairs and sometimes even cooking a kamikaze grenade.
Like the band Metallica, when the game abandons the only feature that made it interesting — drugs — it leaves you with a drab experience akin to watching Lars Ulrich complain about his band mates; that is, repetitive, uninteresting, and intolerable. The poorly implemented threat indicators make it tough to figure out where fire is coming from, and enemies display the intelligence of raging bulls, relentlessly charging you with total disregard for tactics — it’s a wonder Mantel ever comes out on top in a fight. Your comrades are equally moribund; you’ll spend so much time healing them that it’s often best to let them die and go it alone. Haze also features the worst variety of weapons I’ve seen in a long while, and you’ll only fight variations of two enemies over the course of the campaign. Players won’t find solace in the neglected multiplayer, either, which offers all the excitement of a St. Anger b-side.
Haze’s saving grace is its co-op gameplay, which can be fun when you shoot a friend’s Nectar tank from behind to watch him freak out. But these short experiences do nothing to offset the major disappointment the rest of the game delivers.