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Boosh-Braying Morons

At any rate, Nectar is nothing but a straightforward game mechanic where you crank the L2 button every time that you want a boost to shooting, speed, melee attack damage, or damage resistance, or to activate sixth senses that allows you to spot camouflaged enemies in the brush and receive a warning about attacks before they occur (courtesy of an on-screen ripple from the direction in which the attack is about to come). Yet even though self-medicating in this extreme way is a nifty twist on the superpower gimmick that every shooter seems to be getting into in the post-Crysis era, Nectar can be used too frequently. It actually makes you too strong. Adding ramped-up abilities to automatic health regeneration makes it a snap to blast your way through Promise Hand thugs, especially since they're utter morons who charge right at you, never take cover, and frequently don't seem to realize that they're being shot at.

Nectar's lone drawback is the occasional overdose. Every now and then you'll go bananas and lose control of Carpenter after leaning on the L2 a little too much, or from the Nectar Administrator on your back being shot in a firefight causing lots of that sweet, sweet junk to be spewed into your system, or from getting nailed by one of the Hand's Nectar grenades. This doesn't bother you a whole lot, though. You generally come down too quickly for enemies to take serious advantage of your wigged-out state, and it's hilarious to watch Carpenter go berserk and start shooting all the boosh-braying morons in your squad. If only you could do that without chemical enhancement.


At any rate, you don't have to worry about Nectar for the entire game. You soon throw off the shackles of Mantel Corp. oppression and switch sides to fight with the Promise Hand. (Yes, I've revealed the plot twist. Boo-hoo.) At this point, the game switches from being a lame, dumb shooter with one sort of vaguely half-decent mediocre kinda not-bad feature to being a lame, dumb shooter with no forgivable aspects whatsoever, unless you really like the Promise Hand's ability to play dead and steal weapons (you won't). As soon as you become a turncoat, the boredom goes through the roof. You trudge through one run-and-gun firefight after another, with only the odd bit of key hunting and gun-turret jaunting in vehicles livening things up (especially the carrier sequence, which is thrilling despite the déjà vu you'll get from playing this same sort of thing a hundreds of earlier games), and these sequences run on rails.

Speaking of rails, you might want to throw yourself across some and wait for the next train to come by if you bought a PS 3 to experience the visuals of Haze. I don't know if Free Radical started to develop the game on another console and then had to adapt it at the last minute for the Sony console, or whether the programmers all suffered strokes before getting down to crunch time, but this game looks awful. Textures are grainy. Animations are choppy. Clipping is constant when character models meet the jungle scenery. All that I liked about the look of the game were the yellow-accented battle suits worn by the Mantel soldiers. Those superhero-style togs at least gave the game a colorful, Marvel Comics vibe that you don't see in the typical black-and-brown shooter.

Multiplayer

Now we come to the point of the review where I'm supposed to write something like "Yes, the multiplayer sucks, too." But I'm not going to do that here, because the MP in Haze actually isn't all that bad. Sure, you'll have a tough time finding someone to take on in the deathmatch and team assault matches supported over the Playstation Network. But four-player co-op (over the net, via a LAN, or split-screen on the same console) play through the campaign is a blast. Teaming up with real buddies--preferably ones who don't pepper their battle cries with "Beeyotch!" or "Boosh!"--is almost enough to paper over the campaign's many design flaws. Almost.