Despite the nectar premise and the "plucky guerrilla fighter" counters to the Nectar gameplay, the rest of the game ranges from pedestrian to unrefined. Sure, it has a consistent framerate and no loadtimes (thanks to its four gigabyte install), but its looks vary from "pretty good for an HD-gen shooter" to "wow, look at those textures change from low- to high-res back to low-, and check out those cracks!" The weapon pool is really scant, with just a pistol, assault rifle, sniper rifle, flamethrower, and rocket launcher. Sure, there are Mantel and Promise Hand versions of each weapon, but it realistically translates into the Mantel type looking futuristic while the Promise Hand version looks budget and uses a Spanish name. There is a great deal of button-pushing and lever-pulling. The AI ranges from "can sort of keep up with you" to "happily jumps in the line of fire and whines about revival" for friendlies; for opponents, it remains firmly in a "jump out of cover idiotically and shoot away!" mindset. It's also interesting that while I actually love the banal one-liners the Mantel troops scream out, the Promise Hand guys continual shouting of stuff like "Your tyranny ends!" and "Fulfill the promise!" actually ends up being aggravating because they don't have the same "I'm addicted to drugs and say stupid things" excuse.
Its weak-to-mediocre single-player is helped a bit by its multiplayer. There's support for four-player co-op (having three real friends in the campaign is much less aggravating than the gaggle of idiots you get in the single-player) throughout the campaign, and there's even four-seated vehicles to zip around in (though the vehicle control is stiff and not nearly as smooth as in other co-op vehicle games like Halo). Besides that, there's a litany of multiplayer maps that can be played in various modes (deathmatch, team deathmatch, and assault, which grants objectives to Mantel and Promise Hand players). These are passable, and make decent use of the Mantel-versus-Promise Hand interplay, but they lack the pure speed and hilarity of Free Radical's previous efforts.
Haze is a pretty textbook case of "goals far outreaching grasp" in the dictionary of writerly clichés. There are many great ideas within Haze, they just happened to be trapped in an extraordinarily mediocre game. I have a lot of respect for Free Radical, and am hoping that Haze's mediocrity is a fluke. Hopefully this merely adequate turn means that the studio's upcoming TimeSplitters 4 turns out to be brainmeltingly awesome to compensate.
Pros: Hints of a great story and themes; nectar mechanic; runs smoothly with no loadtimes.
Cons: Those story hints get lost in predictable clichés; nectar mechanic is taken away in lieu of lame plucky rebels; glitches and general gameplay consign it to mediocrity.
6/10
