| Haze | 
 enlarge
| From: UBI Soft
Category: Video Games
List Price: $59.99
Buy New: $26.00
You Save: $33.99 (57%)
Buy New/Used from $26.00
Avg. Customer Rating:   (43 reviews)
Sales Rank: 775
Platform: Playstation 3
ESRB: Mature
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: 34385
Model: 34385
UPC: 008888343851
EAN: 0008888343851
ASIN: B000SQ5LQE
Release Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Features:
| • | Play both sides of the same war as an elite Mantel trooper and as a Rebel soldier | | • | State-of-the-art multiplayer modes let you engage in online battles and furious four-player co-op action while revealing hidden secrets in the single-player campaign | | • | Haze comes straight from the developers of the critically acclaimed TimeSplitters series and the publishers of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Far Cry | | • | Get cutting-edge gaming technology exclusively developed for PS3 | | • | Gear-up with a high-tech arsenal of vehicles, deadly weaponry, and the performance-enhancing drug Nectar |
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Set in the year 2048 in a world where Governments have outsourced military operations to Private Military Corporations (PMC), you play a newly enlisted soldier seeking fulfillment and thrills by fighting for a good cause. As the leading PMC, Mantel Global Industries offers a high-tech arsenal of vehicles, deadly weaponry, and on top of that a performance enhancing bio-medical support known as Nectar. As a result, Mantel troopers are the most feared by terrorists, dictators, and the corporation's political enemies. Your conflict begins in a war-torn country where you have been sent to fight a vicious rebel faction, the Promise Hand. At first glance, all is well, but things quickly begin to look a little strange? Entirely streamed experience with no loading times between levels. Fire up your console for online battles and choose from a variety of online modes including furious 4 player co-op action! ESRB Rated M for Mature.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Are you kidding me? August 27, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
To start with something nice, the game is fun. Unfortunately there are more negative aspects to the game that really bring it down.
First and foremost, the graphics are terrible. Not just that but they are inconsistant. Some textures will be pretty nice and others look like the developers just didn't care. The particle effects primarily in the smoke and fire are the worst I have seen in years. They are almost embarrassing.
The game isn't organized well, it seems to just shuffle you around from place to place without much of a purpose. Most of the time I spent either lost not knowing which path to take while hitting select regularly to remind myself of what I was doing.
The AI is awful. You can stand right next to enemies and they won't even see you.
Too easy. The Mantel soldiers are too easy to kill and at certain parts where you are told to hold off the Mantel "onslaught" turns into no more than shooting a couple guys. Some onslaught.
The weapons lack substance. I found myself using the Mantel and Promise Hand assault rifles most of the time. Certain areas are easier by using the rocket launcher but there never seems to be any reasoning with the placement or specific use of other weapons.
Last is the glitches. I have had lockups after check points and fellow Promise Hand soldiers firing at "invisible" enemy Mantel soldiers, hitting me and everyone else in the process.
They always say don't judge a book by its cover and this is one of those cases. The cover looks sweet. The game inside unfortunately is not.
For a PS3 Exclusive title, this game just does not deliver. Ubisoft and Free Radical should be embarrassed.
Average game in a crowded genre. July 19, 2008
Some of the critical reviews of this game are way too harsh. I'll admit that it is not on par with other FPS games on the market. I'll admit that I'd advise people against buying the game and point them towards renting it instead. But this is by no means a horrible game. It is simply an average game in a genre filled with superb titles.
The one thing that brings the game down, in my opinion, is the AI. Enemy AI, even on normal, is stupid. They tend to stand around and wait to be shot. Friendly AI for some reason puts your squad on suicide runs in front of your line of fire, blocking your view of the enemy and getting them killed.
Other than that one complaint regarding the AI, the game play is about average while the story is above average. Don't spend $60 at the store or $40 here. Rent the thing, have some fun over the weekend, and return it when you're done. After all, there are worse FPS on the market (Bioshock, anyone?).
Good Idea - Not Great Execution July 7, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
The first-person shooter - and especially the "futuristic" first-person shooter - has been done, over and over, with little to no changes in gameplay, since almost the beginning of gaming itself. With that said, games like Haze occasionally try to mix things up a little, and while the idea is good, the execution ends up dragging it down a lot.
The underlying plot of the game, both single-player and multiplayer, is that, in the future, a company/organization called Mantel uses a drug called Nectar to produce a generation of drugged-up super soldiers to fight for them in the third world. Multiplayer battles consist of skirmishes between Mantel troopers and rebels, while in singleplayer you start as a trooper and switch sides later on.
The two sides have the same basic first-person gameplay, with some key abilities that are different. Mantel troopers inject themselves with Nectar, which enhances their perception (scopes can zoom in farther, enemies are rendered as glowing objects) and strength (soldiers move faster, hit harder, and regenerate health) as well as providing a hallucinogenic "high". There is a limited supply of Nectar that each soldier has, but it regenerates over time; the supply is counted in "shots" or "injections". Holding the L2 button down injects Nectar into your bloodstream, represented by a gauge. Release the button too soon, and you won't feel the effects of it for long. If you hold it down for too long, though, you can overdose, which renders you unable to tell between friend and foe. In many cases, when you are overdosed, you are unable to control yourself even to the point of randomly firing weapons or arming grenades (which you must shake the controller to throw away before it detonates). If you run out of Nectar, you are highly vulnerable; for this reason, you can usually siphon Nectar off of one of your teammates, if they have enough.
On the other side, the rebels are as weak in combat as a Mantel trooper without his nectar. They make up for this with various ingenious techniques. Some rebel weapons are coated with Nectar, specifically knives and grenades that are made from Nectar-packs taken from dead troopers. Both of these weapons can cause Nectar overloads in enemies, causing the aforementioned self-damaging effects. Playing off of Nectar's effect of making dead bodies "invisible" (bodies fade almost instantly when playing as a trooper, but remain for a long time when playing as a rebel), rebel soldiers can "play dead" when hit, and then "revive" after the troopers have left. Rebels can also do various mechanical improvisations, such as taking ammo from dropped weapons and converting it to ammo for the weapon they are currently using, as well as turning grenades into proximity mines. Finally, they're generally faster and more agile than their trooper counterparts, capable of dodging and in some cases stealing an enemy's weapon.
The single-player storyline is laughable, for the most part, with some interesting parts. You play as Shane Carpenter, wide-eyed idealist youth, who joins Mantel to make a difference and stop the unspecified mass murders and ethnic cleansings that the rebels are carrying out. The story starts on a carrier, where Carpenter meets his teammates - gung-ho, drug-fueled murderers in the finest traditions of sci-fi and war movies everywhere. Only, the difference here is that it makes sense - it's plain to see that Nectar screws with your mind just by the effects that show up when you use it in-game; the blurring, the sudden shifts of motion, and so on. Carpenter's injection system malfunctions several times, which (a) leaves the player unable to use Nectar's beneficial effects, and (b) causes Carpenter to see things that his fellow troopers don't see; a dying comrade, screams of pain, massive piles of bodies, and so on. Carpenter questions his mission more and more, eventually leading to his switch to the rebel side midway through the game. Most of the story is ham-handed dialogue, though there are some good atmospheric moments; walking through one burnt-down village, or trying to find your way through a swamp, for example. These moments tend to only use dialogue as background noise - the heavy-handed boasting of the Mantel troopers contrasts against the quiet of the jungle's ambient noises. The use of camera in cutscenes is interesting, but not really new; the view is always from Carpenter's first-person perspective, though in some scenes his visor will slide away so that the HUD doesn't block your view. In most cutscenes, you can look around but not move, lending at least some feeling of interactivity to the scenes.
As a whole, the gameplay - as mentioned - tries some interesting things, but ultimately falls short. A lot of it makes sense as a Mantel trooper - the poor control, for example, or the lack of solid feeling to movement and aiming - but when you're a rebel and you're supposed to be free of the hallucinatory drug, it's just bad. The guns are the most generic first-person guns ever - a pistol, an assault rifle, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, a chaingun, a flamethrower, and a rocket launcher. None of them handle well, and none of them are particularly fun or interesting, either. Grenades are pretty much worthless, and even in single player I've never managed to kill a person with one even when it exploded right underneath him. The vehicles handle incredibly poorly, often flipping with little to no provocation. On that note, your AI buddies all have roughly the same abilities as yourself, but if they die they are gone forever, and finding new allies is incredibly rare. With that said, most of the times I had allies die (counting times I reloaded afterwards) was in vehicle crashes, when I'd take too much of an angle, my buggy would flip, and my gunner would die. Other than that, the AI soldiers are reasonably helpful, though the troopers and their Nectar injections are much tougher and more helpful than the rebel allies, who lack both the strength of the troopers and the ingenuity of the player and are left with pretty much nothing.
The graphics are nice in some ways and terrible in others. For example, they load slowly, leading to that awkward phase where you watch a person's resolution increase in front of you. In other places, animation is jerky, or edges are jagged, or some other flaw exists that prevents the on-the-surface good graphics from actually being good. Furthermore, the designs are both silly and generic, especially the Mantel vehicles and their bright yellow glass. The voice acting is generic, too; not bad, but by no means actually good, and the ridiculousness of the lines makes up for whatever points good voice acting might have gained.
This game has some good ideas, but the underlying genre of futuristic first-person shooter and the incredibly poor execution of graphics and gameplay render this game unbearable. For PS3 shooters, Resistance was better; for shooters in general, pretty much anything is better. This game doesn't deserve anything higher than a 4/10.
Overated July 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I feel that the hype that was built up in the media and with the companies that created it, was in fact to much hype. The game in my opinion did not reach anywhere near the "greatness" that was all over the advertising for it. Would I ppurchease the sequel if it were released?...Only after renting it first this go around. I will not purchase the sequel without a test run.
Huge Disappointment June 30, 2008
This game was a huge letdown. Graphics, game play, everything was very disappointing. I had so much hope for this game. I wouldn't even recommend renting it.
|
|
|
