HAZE for PlayStation 3 Review

HAZE for PlayStation 3 Review - Oh man, look at this. Another overhyped first person shooter that could not live up to the hype. With the game’s industry the way it is, with people being so hooked on their particular FPS of choice and so many other FPSs coming out and being ignored, I actually understand the marketing. If a company knows they have an average game and not anything amazingly new and special, it might be better to overhype a game in the hope that at least some people will take the risk before being disappointed. And that is what happened here. Haze was hyped so high and when it came out the world gave it a collective, “Meh.” I personally had high hopes for Haze. 

It is developed by Free Radical Design, coming right off the amazing TimeSplitter series to work on this. So you can understand my disappointment. You play as Sergeant Shane Carpenter, a marine sent on a mission to South America to combat the local rebel group known as “The Promise Hand.” After you meet your squad mates, you get sent into the deep jungle to find the rebel leader. story starts off interesting, with some very deep concepts like war time propaganda, hate training in the military and some other ideas that are not really explored much in games. Unfortunately the deepness of the themes are not carried over to the gameplay, which is as shallow as your local kiddie pool. The hook of the gameplay is the use of performance enhancing drugs. 

Just as Barry Bonds used them to make himself into a superman of the baseball field, you will use them to make yourself a superman of the battlefield. All the soldiers use a substance called Nectar. By shooting up a large dose of Nectar, you can outperform what you thought was possible. Your guns will have less kick and you can move through the jungle at break neck speeds. The Nectar becomes part of the story as you will start having unsettling images of people being tortured and other hallucinations. It is an interesting concept but doesn’t live up to the evilness the game makes it out to be because you will always be using it to kill off your enemies. 

That is the main problem with Haze, it doesn’t know what it wants to say. It tells about the horrors of war and people becoming desensitized to evil but then encourages you to shoot up again and go back to the killing. It deals with some deep and interesting concepts but covers them with generic gameplay. It is worth a look, but not an extended stay.