HAZE- PS3
Reviews lately seem to be taking the easy way out and comparing
everything to COD4. “Army of Two’s online isn’t as good as Call of
Duty”, or “Everybody’s Golf World Tour is decent, but there’s no
martyrdom”. But I’m going to review HAZE for what it is: The latest FPS
from Free Radical Design.
You’ve probably heard already that
HAZE is all based around Nectar, a performance enhancing drug that has
its downsides. You take the role of Shane Carpenter, a character you
you’ll probably grow to hate. He is very easily lead, and changes his
opinion just because people tell him to, not the kind of person you
want to play as in a run’n’gun FPS. You’ll spend your first two hours
playing as a Mantel trooper, get hit in the face and quickly switch
sides to rebel without putting much thought into it.
The
opening mantel levels are uninspiring due to atrocious level design.
When I finally started getting into a fire fight, it was over in an
instance, followed by sluggish uneventful walking to the next one. This
is my main gripe with the game. It’s inconsistent. It feels like the
levels where designed by a 15 year old and haven’t been thought out
correctly. However, the fire fights themselves can be quite enjoyable.
Spraying glowing yellow Mexicans from across the room with a fully
automatic gun brings a smile to your face. What this section is missing
is good old iron sights. There are times when enemies are too far away
to hip fire, but to close to use the nectar scope, and I found myself
getting very frustrated trying to hit them.
The fun kicks in
when you make the inevitable switch to the rebel side. Here you get to
make use of several new features, including nectar grenades, weapon
stealing and play dead. All of these come in handy regularly and add a
nice variation to the game. The feeling of punching a storming mantel
trooper in the face, grabbing his gun and annihilating him with his own
gun is hard to beat, and watching mantel troopers freak out after
getting nectar bombed is hilarious. Two abilities seem a little throw
in though. The “booby trap” concept involves facing the ground and
burying a grenade, which a lot of the time doesn’t make sense, as I
wondered how wuss like Carpenter could dig a hole in solid concrete.
Although this feature sounds cool in theory, I didn’t get to use this
once throughout the entire game. Also just feel I should mention that
the vehicle sections throughout aren’t really enjoyable. They’re all
difficult to control, and can’t take much damage.
Maybe I
should have mentioned it earlier, but you DO NOT want to play this in
hard difficulty. The Mantel levels are a breeze thanks to nectar, but
the difficulty suddenly spikes when you switch to rebels. One instance
in particular led to severe cursing at the TV. You are stuck in a small
room and have to guard a hacker while he tries to overload the servers
of the system. Troopers rappel in from random corners of the room, and
progressively start swarming in quicker. But oh no, these aren’t your
regular troopers, these bastards aren’t affected by nectar grenades,
and take a whole clip to drop them. I played this for well over an hour
with three other guys helping me online.
The story itself
probably looked great to FR on paper, but their execution of it is what
held it back. It focuses on the lies behind the Mantel organisation and
the mysterious nectar drug. It attempts to be quite dark at times, but
the cartoonish graphics and mediocre voice acting prevent you from
taking the game seriously. That brings me to my next point- voice
acting. FR obviously tried to create a sense of immersion in the
battles, as AI team mates shout words of encouragement. This is all
fine and well for the first few levels with each side, but after
hearing “Remember your promise to Merino!” for the fiftieth time, you
can imagine that it gets on the irritating side. The rest of the sound
effects are solid however, as gun battles are tense with the sound of
assault rifles blazing coupled with rumble from the Dual Shock 3.
Graphics
seem to be the thing most people complained about in HAZE. The player
models are quite impressive though, along with the visual effects of
nectar injection and overdosing. However, the environment textures
leave a lot to be desired. While I’m far from a graphics whore, at some
stages the poor graphics detracted from the immersion. I’m going to use
an example from a cutscene. You watch a mantel trooper going insane
whilst talking to himself, ending with him blowing his own brains out
in front of his friend who then does the same thing. While this does
sound like a dark and dramatic cutscene, any emotions created are
immediately destroyed by the ridiculously bad blood effects. I’m
talking MS Paint style bad. Another thing to note is how unrealistic
vehicle explosions are. They go on fire first, briefly explode and then
magically tires go flying in all directions but the chassis is nowhere
to be seen.
I also experienced a pretty serious glitch when
playing too. I was speeding through a vehicle level, and swerved to
avoid an enemy drop ship, only to be sucked underground and left to
fall endlessly through space. I had no option but to kill myself and
try again. To my anger the exact same thing happened twice in a row.
This makes me wonder how Free Radical couldn’t have came across this
during those six or seven months they delayed this game.
HAZE
does however slightly redeem itself by offering split screen co-op with
the ability for you and your buddy to play online with several others.
This lent itself nicely to those controller-through-the-wall moments on
hard difficulty. Not much else to mention about co-op except that it’s
fixed vertical split and the rest is exactly the same as single player.
I didn’t get much of a chance to get to grips with the multiplayer but
I did have time to note a few things. Split screen multiplayer option
is nice, especially fun to be on opposing sides. Death match and team
death match get old quick, and don’t offer much variety as there is
only a handful of maps. Team Assault mode however is very interesting.
This game mode gives each team objectives to complete in order to gain
win, and the objectives are different for every map. For mantel it
usually involves simply preventing the rebels from doing something. For
the rebels it’s a little more complicated. One map in particular I
enjoyed was entitles “P.O.W” (Prisoner of War). In this mode, the rebel
team are being held in a circular prison, and have to escape handcuffed
while being hounded by troopers. I had twenty minutes of solid fun with
this game mode, which can't be said for many games.
Multiplayer
aside, HAZE’s relatively short campaign doesn’t offer much
replayability, although the inclusion of split screen online co-op does
spice things up a little, even diehard fans will only play through it
twice at max because of having to endure the slower sections. Core game
play elements are solid and nectar proves to be more than just a
gimmick. On the negative side, lacklustre graphics and bad level design
mean for an inconsistent game. I personally am on the fence about this
one, as there were times I was on the edge of my seat, and other times
I was bored to tears. Friends looking for a fun split screen game
should have a blast, but long time FPS fans will find it hard to
justify a purchase.
SUMMARY:
The Good:
Nectar spices things up
Some intense fire fights
Fun Co-op and multiplayer
Entertaining Visual Effects with nectar
The Bad:
Predictable Plot
Average-Sub Par graphics
Cab get slow/tedious at times
Gamplay:7/10
Graphics:6/10
Sound:6/10
Replayability: 6/10
Overall: 6.5/10 = Not Bad
