Free Radical's Haze: A Hazy Shade of Blah
At the very end of Free Radical's PlayStation 3 shooter Haze, there's a moment where you're given to think for fleeting seconds that part of the team responsible for Nintendo's GoldenEye 007 may yet pop the lid off your boxed expectations. But then it's gone, the credits roll, and you're left sourly shaking your fist at the screen. It's a moment that stands on the shoulders of dozens, places in the story where the writers delve a spade's length deeper than Halo's Master Chief's or Crysis's Nomad have the capacity to. But all for naught, since your ability to express your will within the game is reduced to dotting i's and crossing t's, slinging unimaginative weapons and checking "run-here, push-that" objectives off spoon-fed lists.
Haze launches like a frat-house wingding with firearms, a boo-yah bash that momentarily recalls the Huey assault beach scene in Apocalypse Now (if you linger on the deck of your "land-carrer" long enough, you'll even spot a couple yahoos mucking up the "napalm" line). But then it crawls behind the curtains of guerilla aphorisms and improbable rebel military prowess (rebels with inferior numbers and technology) teasing autonomy, then reseating your shackles. It's a design theme exemplified by moments where the game grabs your head and packs your weapon away so it can drag you through increasingly flimsy story exposition, or to simply ensure -- vexingly -- that opponents you're pursuing always manage to slip away.
That's not to say Haze's problems are merely concept-level. As a straight-up shooter, it exhibits all the hallmarks of a design team aiming for the bottom of the yardstick. If someone pulled together a lexicon of shooter cliches, Haze could be the visual companion piece. Race a vehicle through a minefield, wend linearly through a listing ship until you've exhausted all possible design space, raze a village, escort a missile carrier, and drag gatling crosshairs around 90 degrees of open air to pick off ground targets and punish a dim-bulb pursuing gunship. After you battle across an enormous steel bridge, you're tasked with crawling along its underbelly -- all the way to the side you came in on -- to trip explosives. Doesn't matter if you've already cleared the bridge of enemies, top-to-bottom, either, because they'll "teleport" right back in droves to patch the game's crippled design philosophy.
The mechanics feel flipped around, too. The least interesting one -- Shane’s temporary ability as a corporate merc to inject himself with a drug called Nectar that helps him power through areas -- dovetails with the introductory tactics. But when the more inventive stuff shows up after he defects to a rebel insurgency and gains the ability to play dead, set traps, scavenge ammo, and make grenades, it's crippled by lazy level design and dumb AI. It’s possible to booby-trap areas, for instance, but since the AI never pokes around suspiciously, there's never reason to bother.
And so it goes, for about seven or eight hours. Multiplayer turns in six joyless maps with three parochial deathmatch/team-assault modes. Even the gunplay's drab. Enemies on both sides aim like they've never held a weapon in their lives. Most of the time you can power along by charging right through enfilade fire and popping out in front of bad guys and gun-butting them to the ground. And Haze won't even let you fight in close quarters with your squad-mates until the very end, because they seem to find their way into your line of fire like moths to a bug zapper. Tanks and enemy airships are fodder too, since they have no apparent segmentation or functional detail to target, meaning you can just lob rockets in their general direction and pound away until they buckle under.
"They don't make 'em like they used to" is usually said with a certain amount of nostalgic justification in any medium save gaming. Haze plays like something even less capable than the kind of shooter they used to make over a decade ago.
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The AI in Halo, made in 2003 I think, is better that that.
yeah, when i played the demo on the PSN, i felt that it was nothing special. i don't think i even completed the demo. i went on and did something else.