The box art for Haze features a futuristic super-soldier staring at you through a crack in his full-face helmet visor. His design may remind you of someone else; perhaps another soldier, in another first-person shooter, maybe even on a different format. To get to the not-very-subtle point, ever since Haze was first announced at E3 in 2006, gamers had it pegged as a potential Halo killer, and following Sony’s announcement a year later that the game would be available exclusively on PlayStation 3, many expected the next addition to Free Radical’s CV to go beyond its TimeSplitters series.

Haze fast forwards you to the year 2048 and drops you into the shoes of Shane Carpenter, a foot soldier in the private army of Mantel, a corporation waging war on a rebel faction known as the Promise Hand in an unnamed South American country. Although details aren’t forthcoming, your fellow marines share their dim-witted opinions on the conflict in numerous cut-scenes. The Mantel jocks get their cockiness from Nectar, a bright yellow drug they can administer at will to enhance their combat skills, giving them the edge over their enemy. Too strong a dose, however, and the substance will send them into an uncontrollable fit, firing at anything that moves.

To begin with you’ll engage in a couple of missions with your muscle-brained Mantel buddies, and initial impressions of the game are, for want of a better word, hazy. While the PlayStation 3 is hardly blessed with an abundance of excellent first-person shooters, titles like Half-Life 2 and Call Of Duty 4 have set the bar pretty high, and next to these games Haze’s fundamental shortcomings become apparent straight away. First, combat as a Mantel soldier is not as satisfying as it should be for a number of reasons. The selection of available weaponry is limited, and the firepower you do have at your disposal, from assault rifles to shotguns, feels lightweight. Don’t expect the default difficulty setting to provide much of a challenge in the earlier missions either. The large environments make close-quarters combat a rare occurrence, and thanks to the powerful zoom available on all weapons it’s possible to pick off your targets from a distance, making the action relatively mundane. It would be great if the enemy AI snuck around the environment, stealthily trying to pick you off, but of course they stand in view, soaking up hits, occasionally ducking and being generally thick. The AI system, Conspire, mentioned quite a bit in previews, supposedly ‘allows enemies to dynamically react to other characters and the environment’, but sadly, this seems to be marketing speak for ‘enemies shoot at you and your team and sometimes partially hide behind objects’.

You may have noticed we mentioned your ‘team’ there. Throughout most of Haze you’ll be joined by three AI-controlled team-mates, who are almost as clever as your enemies. We say almost because, while your enemies at least try to shoot you and then duck a bit, your buddies have some bad habits, like running into your line of fire and not being able to shoot something two feet away. There’s no real incentive to keep your team alive, so you just won’t care when a message pops up to say that ‘Michael Sanchez has been killed’, or ‘You killed Freddy Hernandez’. You might feel differently playing with other people, however, as Haze has been designed to be played in four-player split-screen or online co-op mode. While potential laughs could be had by you and three mates, we don’t see why we’re forced to baby-sit three computer- controlled fools the rest of the time.

Free Radical has also attempted to incorporate vehicles into Haze, which may have been another cause of perpetual comparisons with a certain futuristic Xbox series. Appearing in specific sections, boarding one of the limited selection of vehicles changes your view to chase cam, enabling you to see where you’re going. Although the driving sections can be frustrating, they do provide a welcome break from the repetitive running-and-gunning action, with some fun to be had steaming through a canyon while your team shoot at the enemies.

Nectar has been one of the most talked about aspects of Haze. As a Mantel soldier you have a supply that you can dip into – pressing the L1 button gives you a hit, which causes ‘administering’ to pop up on your HUD, and a yellow tint at the edge of the screen. The effects last for a limited time, and enable you to see your enemies more clearly, move quicker, sense danger, and zoom further. Nectar has side effects too, however. Repeatedly pressing the L button will result in an overdose, causing you to have an uncontrollable fit signified by some psychedelic visuals (the ‘haze’ of the title), while wildly firing your weapon. Nectar also acts as a hallucinogen, keeping soldiers positive by showing them what they want to see. Therefore, while you’re jacked up on the fluorescent liquid, enemy corpses will disappear from view.

Haze relies on frequent game engine cut-scenes to get its narrative across, and while some are a little tedious and can’t be skipped, the story itself is a pretty decent attempt by Free Radical to incorporate a more serious, adult tone into its game. Unfortunately, the voice acting is poor in places, especially Carpenter, who sounds whinier than Luke ‘pick up some power converters’ Skywalker, and you’ll soon tire of your team spouting the same old phrases during battle. Shortly into Haze’s campaign the story takes a significant turn, and the game gets a little more interesting as a result. It’s been well documented that Carpenter joins up with the Promise Hand rebels; while we won’t go into the details here, suffice to say that when he does switch sides you get the opportunity to use what you’ve learnt about Nectar against Mantel’s troops. This has been marketed as one of the game’s major selling points, but the vulnerability of your enemy ensures that there still isn’t much of a challenge to be had. You’re able to tape fallen Mantel soldier’s Nectar administrators to your grenades – if Mantel troops are caught in the resulting gas cloud you can sit back as the yellow mist descends, and they thrash about, shooting their colleagues, and then drop helplessly to the deck. Promise Hand Carpenter is no longer dependent on Nectar, and to compensate for this he is slightly more agile, and has a couple of new abilities. He can bury grenades in the ground to create booby traps, roll around to avoid getting hit, and play dead to avoid being seen by your dosed-up enemies.

Like the special Mantel enhancements, these aspects of the game feel tagged on. As a rebel you’re encouraged to use your booby traps during only one set piece, while playing dead and dodging are less effective than just hiding behind cover, so you’ll find yourself approaching new situations in much the same way you would any other FPS. Using Nectar grenades can be pretty good fun, but there always seems to be plenty of ammo around, so it’s often easier to pick enemies off using conventional methods. The game also doesn’t address each faction’s shortcomings in the campaign mode – when you’re with Mantel, the rebels are easily beaten, and don’t attempt to exploit your Nectar dependency, but as a rebel, Mantel troops feel like the weaker side.

Graphically, Haze has its moments. At certain points the game produces some impressive visuals, with dense jungles and lush beaches littered with moveable objects, and effects such as HDR lighting and depth of field blurring add to the overall look. Sadly, these moments are rare, and the game is littered with ugly textures, visual artefacts, and other graphical glitches that will mar your enjoyment. Haze’s environments range from bland and unimaginative to borderline tactical, but despite the occasional expansive area, make no mistake: Haze is a linear shooter. So much so, in fact, that you’ll come to accept that your next objective is likely to be finding a lever to open a door, or pressing a button to activate some machine – elements that feel hugely dated in this supposed ‘next generation’ of gaming.

Haze is built around Free Radical’s own proprietary engine, which seems to have a hard time doing justice to all the ideas in the game, some of which aren’t bad. The game’s unique selling point, Nectar, is integral to the intelligent storyline, but never feels integral to the gameplay, unlike say, the use of the gravity gun in Half-Life 2 to solve puzzles. Because you can play through Haze in a generic way, the Mantel and Promise Hand special abilities feel gimmicky, and when you do occasionally get your hands on vehicles you just find yourself driving a set route, rather than deciding how best to approach a situation.

Haze underwent a couple of development delays, which makes it more difficult to explain why the game feels unfinished. Issues with textures not loading properly and AI glitches are one thing, but when one of your team-mates disappears in front of your eyes regularly at a certain point in the game, something’s not quite right. Other problems just seem to be lack of attention to detail – Mantel troops aren’t affected by Nectar overdoses when in vehicles, cut-scenes tend to fade to black a lot when they could be seamless, and in one instance the game decided to bleep swearing from our previously potty-mouthed marine chums.

The biggest and most frustrating glitch we found was on the very last stage. Over an hour in, the game decided to automatically save a checkpoint, and kill us off at the same time, meaning that upon reloading, Carpenter was helplessly falling through the air to his death. Nice. Free Radical should be commended for attempting to weave a mature, politically charged narrative, with new gameplay concepts (although shaking the Sixaxis to stop yourself from burning doesn’t quite work). The ability to play the game co-operatively with up to three other players either split-screen or online may entice some, but on the strength of the campaign, and the limited appeal of the multiplayer game you may want to wait for a more polished shooter.

Tom Hopkins