Haze

Haze
"BOOSH!"
Protagonist(s): Shane Carpenter Genre(s): First-person shooter Platform(s): PlayStation 3 Release: May 20, 2008 (NA) May 22, 2008 (JP) May 23, 2008 (EU) Developer(s): Free Radical Design Publisher(s): Ubisoft (WW) Spike (JP) Country: United Kingdom Successor: Haze 2 (cancelled)

Haze is a first-person shooter game released exclusively for the PlayStation 3 in 2008, developed by Free Radical Design and published Ubisoft. The game was originally going to receive Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows versions, but both versions were scrapped.

It was hyped as a "Halo Killer" with anti-war themes, coming out only a year after Halo 3.

Plot

Sergeant Shane Carpenter is a member of the world-ruling Mantel Corporation, whose private military company enhances their soldiers with a drug known as Nova-Keto-Thyrazine, also called "Nectar". The drug not only enhances the performance of the user, but also create hallucinations of a painless battlefield, devoid of death and destruction.

Shane and his fellow troops are deployed to South America to eliminate a group of rebels calling themselves "The Promise Hand", led by Gabriel "Skincoat" Merino. When his Nectar administrator fails to function, he becomes horrified by the harsh realities of war, gets hunted down by his former comrades-in-arms, and ultimately defects to the rebels.

It should be noted that the plot of the game was originally intended to take place in present-day Iraq before being relocated into a sci-fi setting.

Why It Couldn't Remember it's Promise To Merino

1. The storyline while interesting at first is executed poorly.
   • There is a plot twist that is negated by there being no difference in how the player and friendly AI operate after joining the Promise Hand.
2. It makes a bad attempt at giving an anti-war message that feels like a rejected Captain Planet episode.
3. The game also can't decide if Nectar is supposed to be a metaphor for propaganda, drugs or oil.
4. Multiple rewrites, resulting in cutting out most of the ideas that would have made the game interesting. For example, the cover shot of Shane with a smashed faceplate is from a scene that is in one of the trailers which didn't appear in the final game. And despite being seen in many trailers and promotional materials which imply he is the main antagionist, David Bloomfield, the CEO of Mantel Corp. never appears in the game aside from being mentioned twice.
5. Development hell: Much of the development time and budget was wasted on licensing an advanced task-based AI system where enemies would evaluate their circumstances and figure out the best course of action, only for Free Radical to discover the system could not be made to operate on the PS3's hardware. This forced them to discard almost all of their work and start over.
6. Plot Holes: Why does Merino's peaceful village have a nuclear missile parked a hundred yards away? Or why Mantel soldiers don't keep tripping over invisible bodies when they use nectar?
7. The Mantel Soldiers are extremely unlikable and very annoying as they act like a bunch of frat boys stereotypes, special award goes to Duvall who always has an obsession with meat and always says buddy for no reason, Watchstrap and Peshy who always keep bumping chests and says "BOOSH!". Luckly you get to kill them by the second half of the game.
   • The Rebel Soldiers aren't any better as they constantly say "Remember your promise to Merino!" line during the second half of the game and it gets old and annoying very fast due to how much it is repeated by your NPC allies.
   • And none of the allied NPCs ever shut up.
8. The game uses poorly implemented Six-Axis controls that are needed when you're on fire after being hit with a flamethrower.
9. The main highlight feature of the game: The Nectar is completely removed after joining the Rebel side and now plays like an generic modern first person shooter game.
10. Cringy, hammy, and downright terrible voice acting with cheesy dialogue that makes the first Resident Evil sound like an Oscar-winning performance.
    • It's even obvious that the voices were done by English people trying to fake American accents, but failing.
11. Extremely choppy framerate that mostly sticks around to the mid 20s.
12. The graphics are poor as it suffers from low saturated colors and sometimes blurry textures.
    • The character models look like something out of an SFM video.
    • It also sometimes fails to render vehicles making them invisible
13. The single-player mode suffers from poor balancing issues, caused by the following:
    • Nectar itself, which is available for the first half of the game. Silly name aside, the game tries to portray the drug as a bad thing, however it gives so many advantages that you’ll just keep on using it whenever available.
    • While playing as a Mantel soldier, you also somehow regenerate ammo for your unequipped weapon, so just shoot a Mantel sniper and grab his overpowered rifle to sail through the entire first half of the game.
    • One level in the Mantel side requires you to drive through a canyon booby-trapped with vehicle mines. Unfortunately they are placed in frustratingly unpredictable places, which result in destroying your vehicle and killing you.
    • When playing as a rebel in the second half, you can play dead. While doing this you will regenerate your health and then wake up. The mechanic is so poorly handled that it can be easily abused which makes dying impossible, but enemies can often still shoot you even when you're playing dead, which means you'll immediately die after waking up.
    • You can also "scavenge" ammo for your equipped weapon, but it's an useless mechanic as ammo is almost pretty common everywhere in the levels.
    • The late game enemies such as the Heavy Troopers and their support variants aren't much better, as they are bullet sponges and the supports are armed with rocket launchers that can kill you fast.
14. The final boss fight with Morgan Duvall is extremely anti-climactic. You just shoot him a few times with a rifle or a rocket launcher and he dies. It also suffers from unfair difficulty due to the fact that he is equipped with a pistol that can kill you in 2 hits.
    • The cutscene after defeating him is also laughably bad, he screams too much despite looking fine and his last line must be heard in order to believe: "Shane. Please. Don't tell my Mom." and than Shane replies by just saying "OK."
15. The single-player mode is very short as it can be beaten in 3 and a half hours!
16. There is no option to alter aiming sensitivity because the different "feel" of Mantel and Promise Hand soldiers is supposed to be part of the multiplayer faction balance and it's bad because the sensitivity in this game is atrocious which makes being accurate a chore, there is an aim assist option but it doesn't feel like it does anything.
17. Most of the Rebel abilities are completely useless in Multiplayer. In particular, no human player will be fooled by a Rebel playing dead, since they do not drop their weapon when they go down in the play dead animation.
18. The multiplayer has bots, but unfortunately said bots have poor AI.
19. Free Radical's there-aren't-enough-airquotes "writer" Rob Yescombe had the gall to complain that the UK government wasn't doing enough to support videogame studios, in a transparent attempt to drum up money to finish Haze after both Sony and Ubisoft had told FRD they weren't getting any more. Thankfully, this didn't work.
20. Overall, it killed Free Radical Design as a company once and for all and the game failed as being an "Halo Killer", the closure of the company also resulted in games that were in development such as Star Wars: Battlefront III and TimeSplitters 4 being canceled and never coming back, although Free Radical Design came back now known as Crytek UK.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The theme song by Korn is amazing to listen to.
2. It spawned an famous PSN profile icon that most users probably used.
3. The first half of the game, despite the allies being annoying as heck, was great as you get to use the Nectar powers.
4. The concept of the Nectar being a drug that is used to hide the crimes of the war is great, sadly it was poorly executed.
5. Shane Carpenter and Merino are the only likable characters in this game.

Reception

The game received generally "mixed reviews", and holds a 55% approval according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.

Trivia

• The game spawned an famous profile PSN icon that most users probably still use to this day.
• In 2007, plans for a sequel to Haze were made, but it never made it past the pitching stages.

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