El Vaquero

Issue date: 6/11/08 Section: Entertainment

Result of nectar's consequences: more proof that you should not use drugs.

Haze is a first-person shooter (FPS) that has been made by Free Radical exclusively for the Playstation 3 (PS3). Free Radical has had a good run with the shooter genre, starting off strong with 007: Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 console, and then providing more high quality titles, such as the Timesplitters series.


With all of that experience behind them, its quite shocking to see how Free Radical messed up with Haze. Haze is still a solid shooter that is worth a look, but the game's merits are almost completely lost in its own hazy mist.


The premise of Haze has you playing as a character named Shane Carpenter, who has had a rough past but wants to do good deeds for the world. As a result, Carpenter joins the army of Mantel, a mysterious military industrial corporation that provides its troops with a drug called nectar, which makes their troops more powerful and neatly shields their eyes from the ugly sights of warfare, such as blood and dead bodies.


You'll probably appreciate it more if you do your research and get familiar with the undertones used in Haze's story, which include the mockery of generic shooter characters, the consequences of drug usage, media manipulation, and more. Even with these undertones, however, Haze's story is very boring, and never gets you truly involved.


The basic game play of Haze revolves around two different sides, the Mantel Troopers and the Promised Hand Rebels, and their distinct usage of nectar.


The Mantel troopers use nectar to make fighting their enemies easier. When used, nectar increases the trooper's fighting capability and highlights enemies with a red glow, making them very hard to see. Nectar also gives the troopers other advantages, such as the ability to see the blast radius of an explosive before it goes off.


The troopers have to be careful and avoid going into an overdose or else they will lose control and start shooting everyone in their vicinity.


The rebels don't use nectar directly on themselves like the troopers do. Instead, the rebels have abilities such as dodge rolls, the ability to use nectar-infused knives and grenades to force overdoses on the troopers, and the power to play dead to hide from the troopers, since they can't see dead bodies.

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