With all of this hubbub about Haze, its poor review scores, the developers trying to convince us it is actually a good game, while many others try to convince us it isn’t, I decided to spare 1500MB and give the demo a download from the PS Store. Now, I was playing this at 12.45am, but I think that I got a pretty good representation of what the game has to offer. I will try to keep the info as unbiased as possible and simply tell you what the game offers.





HAZE DEMO REVIEW

The menu is clean, efficient and works fine; it isn’t the most attractive menu, but it gets the job done. It gives you all the basic stuff Campaign, Online, Options etc. I chose campaign and threw the difficulty on hard. The demo opens with you in the midst of a firefight with the rebels, tasked with finding a mantel plane that was shot down. I run forward 5 steps, start getting shot from somewhere and then fall over dead in less than 10 seconds; not exactly the best start to a game, but hey. The first thing I noticed was that the jungle looked like it had been placed there for me, like it was built for this firefight; it seemed so artificial, tacked on and merely served as backdrop to my bullets.

After quickly getting used to the controls, I run over to a log and duck behind it, which provided very minimal defense against the enemies. I was hit a good 4-5 times while ducked behind this log, and I could not see over the top of it; once I was even killed while hiding behind cover that I could not see out of. Playing through again on medium yielded no difference other than the amount of times I was shot.

Speaking of shooting, there are about 5 unique guns in Haze, technically 10 if you include their equal enemy counterpart. In the demo you are given a machine gun and a pistol; a pistol which doubles as a sniper rifle when you’ve got Nectar running through your blood. The spray of bullets makes shooting your gun nothing more than a gamble, you don’t even have your initial shot hit where you want it, the moment you hit the trigger you start to spray all over the place. Now I am no hater of recoil, in fact I love me some good recoil; to me, FEAR still has some of the best movement, weapons and recoil for a FPS. You’d think with all those drugs in their system that their accuracy would improve at least a little more noticeably.





After disposing of the rebel scum, our superiors informed us of a rebel village ahead of our position, so being the nice guys that they are, they told us not to worry because they would bomb the village from the air; joy. I made my way down the well built, park sidewalk…I mean the thick, downtrodden, jungle path, and noticed horribly modeled flora and some really bad texturing, the lighting wasn’t too bad but it was rather stale, like they just included god-beams for the hell of it. I am no graphics whore, as long as a game does not look like Superman64 I am as happy as a pig in mud, so when I say these were poorly modeled and badly textured, I am referencing them against other assets in the game. The mantel soldiers for instance, look awesome; you can see every contour, shadow and seam-line of their suit. However there was one tree that had 3 sides to it, like it was from the ‘Jungle’ level of Goldeneye or something. (not that it didn’t look awesome in it’s day)


THE JUNGLE IN THE DEMO LOOKED NOWHERE NEAR THIS GOOD

So anyway, I make my way through the “jungle” and come to a smoking wreckage of a village, one of my team mates makes note of why bombs are great or something equally stupid. Now this is the part that made me think that this game may be worth playing through. As I entered the village and walked over to a piece of scrap metal, I started to hear very faint screams, like someone was in pain. All of a sudden your Nectar feed gives out and you get a 1 second glimpse of what the battlefield looks like through unaltered eyes; there are corpses strewn across the floor, bodies burning and some in pieces on the ground. I’m not sure what it was about the little section that made me gain interest though… I guess if they can achieve something like that in one part, there may very well be a lot more too this game than is on the surface.

You trek through what is left of the village and verse some more rebels and make it to the edge of a cliff, where the plane has crashed, that looks out upon an enormous landscape, with visuals that look very close to the backdrops in Halo 3. You go in to the plane’s cargo bay, walk up to the half dead pilot and he starts talking…

“h….h…………hhey……………hey…………”

“hey…”

“c…..*wheezing* ….can…..can ..you see…me?.............ca…….can you see me?...”

"Yeah...I-I see you."

“You know….what I used to d….used to do……before I ….joined up…?”

“don’t worry about that right now”

“I ….I used to be a Boxer….semi pro”

*dead*

The voice acting of the characters is not HORRIBLE, but it does take some getting used to the fact that they are actually taking themselves serious. The pilot dies, you hear gunfire and automatically turn around to spot more rebels, if you turn back around the pilot is gone. You kill the rebels, jump on a reinforcement ship and the demo ends.





Ok, so based on what I experienced in the demo I have to say that IGN was overly critical in their review. The AI is actually not that bad, the settings are enough to keep you interested, although the quality varies greatly, even just in the small area I played, guns are subpar, characters seem doable and the overall feeling of playing the game is just an average shooter. I can say now that playing as a Mantel soldier and using Nectar is pretty lame, I’m usually so confused by my screen warping in and out of shape when I take the fucking drug that I am pelted with bullets and half of my health is gone before I have fire a single shot back. Think of the Nectar booster button as the “run faster and hit harder for 30 seconds” button. Because other than that, it did fuck all except make my screen go yellow and blurry.

Over all, I WOULD buy this game based on what I played, but not at it's current price tag. It is more than definitely worth a rental if you liked playing the Halo series or something like Timesplitters. But don't buy it right now, your money can be better spent on something that will be a little more interesting.


(also, I don't usually do this, but my last blog was buried pretty fast, so anyone who wants plenty of Skate2 details go here)