A new meaning to Hazing (Haze (PS3))

Member Name: LastLine

Product:	Haze (PS3)
Date:	05/06/09 (4 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: Not at all innovative

Haze is one of those games that had intrigued me since long before I actually bought a Playstation 3. Something about the artwork on the case caught my interest and made me want to play. Surprise surprise when I bought my Playstation three a year ago it was the first game I bought with it.

You play the part of a soldier in the Mantel army. The Mantel army has been dispatched (read hired) to liberate a small country from a rebel group. Your arsenel from the cut scenes consists of armoured jeeps, massive land craft carriers and several other exotic weapons. In gameplay? It rarely consists of more than a standard hundred rounds a minute machine gun and a couple of grenades - the weapons in the game feel sadly generic and as if you could have picked up any shooter from the last five years and put your character into it without a big problem. Still this wasn't a huge problem as weaponry wasn't pushed as being your characters main ability, something called Nectar was. Now Nectar is what makes your soldier different from other men, it's essentially a stimulant drug designed to help your awareness of the battlefield around you, improve your accuracy, your response time...things like that. Which it does, by slowing down the world around you in an almost bullet time like style, and by highlighting enemy troops in a yellowish glow to emphasise your acute senses. This makes the game interesting for a short while.

Eventually you are given a choice of paths to follow, which I shan't go into for fear of spoiling the game story for other people, but suffice to say that I'm pretty convinced whatever choice was made the game would have progressed the same way. Sadly the lack of innovative gameplay after this stage has left me far from compelled to go back and play again to find out if it is a real choice or not.

The game ends trying to make a philosophical point about the use of Nectar, which you'll see if you play the game - a good effort, but poorly executed in my mind.

Summary: At the sub £10 bracket it's now at? If you want a game for a weekend go for it, if you want somethin