Mama Said There'd Be Games Like This: Haze [REVIEW]

Posted by Gary Hodges at 12:20 AM May 25, 2008

Haze charges to the PS3 exclusively... another key piece of evidence that PS3 owners burned down a puppy mill in a past life. Then ate the charred puppy carcasses. In front of the puppies' whimpering mama dog. Then made racist jokes.

For as long as I can remember, game magazines have (somewhat inexplicably) printed letters from readers who just want to remind the staff that they have a pretty awesome job, and they're lucky to have it.

The response is always the same: “It might seem like a great job, but keep in mind some of these games are really shitty.” They point out that when you play a bad game, you’re allowed to shut it off after 15 minutes and then go register your discontent on the Internet (or kick your dog or beat your wife – whatever it is you do). Reviewers, on the other hand, have to stick with it, regardless of how offensive, boring, or just fucking terrible it is, all the way through. “It’s not all sunshine and roses!” they remind.

I’ll give you the straight poop: They’re lying. The job is awesome, we are lucky, and those who try and diminish that fact are either full of shit or spoiled, spoiled, spoiled (a single ‘spoiled’ simply wouldn’t suffice) out-of-touch little man children. One job I had involved spending a summer day in the Arizona desert (100° by 9am) shoveling apart a Volkswagen-sized packrat’s nest, the football-sized vermin brushing between my legs as they fled the demolition and thick yellow clouds of dust that might as well have formed the words “Hanta Virus” like a cartoon – that’s a “not all sunshine and roses” job; reviewing videogames… well, I roll my eyes when it's described as a job at all, much less a “sometimes bad” one.

But games like Haze definitely challenge my beliefs.

Haze
Developer: Free Radical Design / ESRB Rating: M / Price: $59.99

Thanks to my expertly-tuned gamedar, I had the feeling Haze was going to be a great big turkey early on, probably after suffering through piles of interviews by the gaming press in which the developers talked endlessly about all the Big Ideas explored in the game’s story rather than, you know, what made the game worth playing. The most recent marketing push – which emphasizes the fact Korn wrote a song "inspired" by the game – only reinforced my skepticism. But oh, it ended up being so much worse.

There’s an important distinction to make here: it’s not a terrible game, it’s an offensively stupid game. It’s the same reaction I had to a woman I once met at a dinner party, who explained in all earnestness that there actually is a cure for AIDS, but it’s bleach, and they can’t use it as a cure yet because they haven’t figured out how to administer bleach without killing people.

That’s offensively stupid. Beyond dumb, it's aggravated, reckless dumb; the kind of stupid that makes your head hurt from the gears in it screeching to a halt, the kind of stupid that circumvents any rational response and instead just makes you angry.

That’s where I’m at right now, trying to unstick the gears in my head so I can actually detail Haze’s shittiness, rather than just go with my first instinct, a succinct

I fucking hate this game.
Sincerely,
Gary W. Hodges

I’ll try to do better.

The story – the same one Free Radical Design’s been pushing as Haze’s raison d'être (or at least its raison t’care) from day one – is shallow, pretentious, warmed-over twaddle, progressing like an action-packed, explosion-filled short story a 12 year old scribbled in his diary the day he first encountered the notion that maybe, sometimes, you can think you’re right… but you’re actually wrong!

You begin the game as a new recruit in a macho, moronic, overtly bloodthirsty and cruel band of chest-thumping drug addicts who are not just suspect, but outrageously detestable from minute one – totally destroying any chance of shock or horror when the game finally redundantly spells out for you “hey, I’m on the wrong side”.

The “right” side in this case is a band of Latin Americans led by a preachy, preternaturally forgiving man who manages to rehabilitate you by merely asking What You’re Fighting For, at which point you suddenly – and seemingly without any consternation at all – merrily start murdering your former comrades with as much self-reflection and solemnity as you were slaughtering brown people 10 minutes before. (In a tragically unintentionally hilarious moment, your character – just recovered from a mission where he killed dozens of rebels – explains to a suspicious new ally: “It’s okay! I changed my mind.”)

The gameplay is empty and uninspired, leaving me searching for even one or two interesting things to say about it… um, you can play dead sometimes. There.

The levels are boring, the missions bland, and the enemy AI could easily be turned over to a goldfish to no noticeable detriment - back up behind a corner and just shoot suckers in the face as they dutifully follow.

The controls stubbornly refuse to adhere to any standardized FPS formats, forcing most players to rush to the options screen and rearrange commands to buttons virtually every other game in the genre had an uspoken agreement to use. But even when tweaked, aiming feels, for lack of a better word, slippery, loose and inexact. Driving vehicles is similarly sloppy with almost no middle range in control: the smallest nudge sends you into a hard turn, anything less than that barely changing your course at all.

The visuals would barely be adequate for a launch title, unacceptable for a much-ballyhooed PlayStation 3 exclusive – and ditchy for good measure, with clipping issues and texture glitches throughout. (Simply put: don’t believe the screenshots, they’re Ubisoft’s typical high-res, Photoshop-finessed horseshit.)

This isn't the game I played... maybe it's Haze 2 for the PlayStation 4.

The voice acting is headache-inducing, the multiplayer is no different from any other generic online FPS, and being able to play through the campaign with friends is meaningless when it’s awful enough alone.

That’s not to say Haze doesn’t have some redeeming qualities. For example, the offline campaign is mercifully short.

You might have noticed a tone in this review. I admit, I am angry. I spent three days playing this game, and $60 of my own cash for the pleasure. I would rather have played any other game. I would rather have played no game at all.

But reviewing games is still a pretty awesome job, because even though playing bad games kinda sucks… ripping on bad games isn’t so bad.

Until next time…

Final Rating:

1 out of 5 Blue Pig Ganons