Haze

Haze is a game created by Free Radical, a company known for games such as the TimeSplitters series, the company was shut down in 2008 and has been bought by Crytek. The publisher was Ubisoft, which is known for a huge range of games. Haze was released on May 2008. A year in which games like Killzone 2, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4 hit the market, which meant major competition for Haze.

The game is set in 2025, where no UN or NATO exist and governments are thus forced to contract their military operations to PMCs). You play as Sergeant Jake Carpenter, a new recruit in the Mantel Global Industries army, who are fighting guerillas in South America. Mantel is also an MNC with bio-medical expertise. This has led to the development of Nectar, a nutritional supplement that enables soldiers to fight harder and smarter. The game takes place over three days that will 'change Jake forever' as Mantel battle a guerilla group known as The Promise Hand lead by a dictator called Gabriel "Skin coat" Merino; a brutal man who wears the flayed skins of his POW camp inmates.

The game had a lot of promotion before it came out and created quite a hype, many people even called it the halo-killer. However the game didn't live up to its expectations and was soon seen by many reviewers as a below-par game.

The graphics in this game aren't too special, for the most part they are a bland and dull, giving the game a bit of a boring experience. The surroundings are pretty standard and you don't really have any noteworthy levels that'll leave a memorable experience. The player characters might be averagely detailed, but are nowhere near as good as Halo was, when it got first released. This game doesn't have any ground-breaking improvements, making it a standard shooter.

The gameplay isn't very different from a standard FPS, you simply shoot the enemy in order to get higher on the rankings. There isn't a leveling system in which you unlock things by playing well. This game only features four different types of guns, which are the sniper rifle, the machine gun, the shotgun and the pistol. Each faction, Mantel and the Rebels, has their own version of these guns, but besides the looks there aren't any differences. So this is quite a limited amount of guns featured in this game, making this game boring rather fast.

The game has some unique features to it, which all have to do with Nectar, which is a drug used to make Mantel soldiers better at waging war. These Mantel soldiers can use Nectar in order to see enemies more easily, by giving some sort of a heat-detector. The rebels can abuse Nectar in order to give Mantel soldiers an overdose causing them to go berserk and make them shoot friend and foe during this period. The Rebels also have the ability to lay mines and to scavenge ammo from guns that aren't from their own faction.

When it comes to sound in this game, there isn't really anything worth mentioning. There was however one thing that annoyed me a lot, and that was that if you were fighting for the Rebel side online, you sometimes had to listen to a shitty rap song playing in the background, which couldn't be turned off in anyway, whilst the Mantel didn't have any of that crap to deal with.

The online mode is where the game truly lets down, the maps aren't really varied and are always wide open maps. I'd have preferred to play in a close-combat environment, since that would discourage many people to pick up the sniper rifle, but alas, you'll probably be sniped a couple of hundred times before you get sick of it and throw this game in your cabinet and never look back. The game doesn't give players the option to choose their weapons before they spawn, instead you have to pick a weapon from the battlefield, and because you have to hold the triangle-button this takes more than a few seconds, leaving you as an open target. The lag on the servers is also a big problem in this game, every server you join seems to have this problem, making playing usually an unpleasant experience if that wasn't already the case. This game also offers a co-op mode in which you can play online or play the campaign together, which works rather well, although I wouldn't mind an option for changing how the screen was divided between the two players. The game also has only a few game-modes online, which is a missed opportunity, the few they have are spin-offs of various popular modes, however Deathmatch isn't included, only Team Deathmatch, which is a bit odd in my opinion, since if it truly wanted to compete with Halo, it should've added it, since Slayer is one of the more popular modes there.

So all-in-all, the game isn't really worth your money, since there are way better shooters out there on the PS3, such as Fear 2, Warhawk, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Killzone 2. The game could've been way better if they focused more on developing the game than the promotion of the game. The choice is up to you, are you spending your money on a better game or are you fighting for the Mental corporation?