Halo’s inbred step-cousin
Do you all remember when FPS games around the PS3 era would brag about being the next “Halo-Killer”? Well, Haze was one of those wannabes – strutting in like it was about to dethrone Master Chief and take over the world. Spoiler alert: It didn’t. Comparing Haze to Bungie-era Halo is like putting a soggy gas station hot dog next to a perfectly cooked steak – sure, they’re both technically food, but I wouldn’t even feed Haze to my cat – mostly because he’s too busy knocking things off the counter and nonchalantly getting centimeters from accidentally shutting my console off (HE FUCKING KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING!). My cat and I don’t always see eye-to-eye politically but at least I know he has good taste in video games and would never bother with this flavorless pile of digital slop.
Haze actually has a decent premise on paper: You play as Shane Carpenter, a soldier hooked on a mind-altering drug called Nectar that makes you strong and, apparently, really stupid. You’re fighting for a shady company called Mantel, convinced you’re the good guy – until you realize you’ve been duped. Turns out, the “enemy” you’ve been killing while you’re really just tripping balls are freedom fighters, and the Nectar you’re on is basically corporate mind control. So, Shane has a moment of clarity, switches sides, and tries to take down the corrupt company. It has a similar setup to a Black Mirror episode. Unfortunately though, that’s about as far as the praises go because the gameplay is a muddled mess of outdated mechanics (even for 2008). The controls feel stiff, the shooting lacks any real impact, and the AI is about as sharp as a fucking marshmallow. It’s a tired combination of generic cover-based shooting and dull, linear objectives that make you wish you were playing literally anything else.
Haze is about as satisfying as a knockoff brand of black licorice. Sure, there might be a handful of poor souls who claim to enjoy it, but you wouldn’t invite them to your backyard barbecue – you’d be too afraid they’d show up with a lukewarm casserole full of raisins and bad opinions, insisting it’s “an acquired taste.”
This game is what I believe the industry refers to as “fuck-ugly”. The environments are a depressing mix of puke green and mud brown, making every level feel like you’re trapped in an abandoned dumpster. Every single character model is corpse stiff – they all look like they’ve been thoroughly beaten with the ugly stick until the stick just gave up. It’s like someone took the worst parts of early PS3 graphics, dunked them in a vat of expired oatmeal, and then slapped them onto the screen like they were trying to ruin your day on purpose. I even had to trade my used copy in for a different one because the one I had kept making me fall through the damn ground into an endless void over and over again, and I was stuck from being able to progress past the second mission. I don’t even know why I gave it a second chance – this game fucking sucked from start to finish. Even after I traded in my used copy for a fresh one, Haze was still riddled to the bone with glitches and technical issues. At one point, I fired at an enemy, and he just shoots straight into the sky like fucking Superman. Then, just for kicks, the game decided to make my character float for a few minutes like a balloon before dropping me through the floor again.
This was Free Radical Design’s swan song before they flatlined the following year (big surprise there). Haze was hyped like it was gonna redefine shooters – what we got was a busted-ass, bug-ridden mess. Haze was so desperate to take down Halo it even gave itself a knockoff-sounding name – like someone misheard it through a crappy headset and just rolled with it. “Wait, did you say Halo? Nah man, we got Haze!” – Same number of letters, starts with an “H” – that’s all it takes to be a Halo-killer, right? Just slap an edgy name on it, pump in some dollar-store dystopia, and boom – watch it crash and burn like a bootleg Master Chief stunt double trying to ride a unicycle through a minefield.
AmHAZEingly bad,
Mikhail
PS: Shoutout to Chadwick the Kitty! 🐈
Verdict: 4/10