Free Radical is an interesting developer for two reasons. The first point of interest is that the company was founded by several former employees of Rare. Back on the Nintendo 64, Rare redefined the first person shooter with Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Free Radical went on to create their own first person shooter series called Time Splitters, which was praised for its fast paced multiplayer action. Free Radical also created Second Sight, a fantastic game which combined the stealth genre with psychic powers.

The other interesting thing about Free Radical is you could always tell their games apart by their signature art style with subtly caricatured characters. Free Radical has now made their foray into the next generation of consoles with Haze – another first person shooter. While Haze unfortunately lacks Free Radicals iconic art style, it still has ties to Second Sight for having a story filled with conspiracies, corruption and corporations.

Haze is set in the year 2048 where you take on the role of Shane Carpenter, a soldier fighting for the army of a gigantic corporation called Mantel. Mantel is also a pharmaceuticals company, and as such all Mantel soldiers are constantly kept on a drug called Nectar. This drug sharpens the senses and makes for better soldiers - but it also masks the violence of warfare. It’s not long before you end up getting off Nectar and are fighting to bring down the evil corporation with the aid of The Promise Hand; the rebels who were once your enemy.

At least, that’s the idea. The biggest problem with Haze is that it has this fantastic premise which is fails to properly convey.

As a Mantel soldier you constantly have Nectar flowing through your blood. This keeps you from seeing bodies on the ground, seeing blood and seeing any real consequence of killing. By boosting your Nectar supply your senses sharpen; enemies glow and are easy to spot, melee attacks kill instantly and the magnification when sniping is greatly increased. This all works really well and makes finding and killing enemy rebel soldiers quite easy.

However, when you end up fighting on the rebel side, free of Nectar, the experience of the so-called ‘horrors of war’ isn’t anywhere near as intense as it needs to be. Sure, there are bodies on the ground and a bit of blood splatter, but it’s not so drastically different as to shock you with its brutality. The game really needed a Saving Private Ryan level of horrible, realistic violence in order to convey its message about the brutality of men. And yet, there are cut scenes which have characters with bloodied hands who choke and cry as they die. It’s both terrible and poignant – but it only happens to characters in cut scenes. The game would have had so much more impact if after a battle you looked around and saw your foes slowly bleeding to death in a pool of their own blood, crying out, mutilated and helpless. Instead, characters die quickly without a fuss or with a brief squirming animation. The contrast between playing as a Mantel soldier and rebel fighter just isn’t there. On a more minor, but still irritating point, the corporate side of Mantel isn’t addressed or represented at all and not enough is done to set up the premise of this military/pharmaceutical mega-company before you’re thrown into a combat situation. Even just having the game open with this promotional video would have made a big difference.

With its key concept poorly realised, Haze is an average first person shooter for the most part. While it does have exciting moments when it manages to instil a sense of danger and urgency, the majority of game time is spent walking and driving from point A to point B and killing everyone in between – and there’s a number of problems with this. For starters, you keep having the constant ill fortune of having to go the long way around to reach point B. At one point you have to get to the roof of a hotel for a helicopter extraction. After you finally arrive at the hotel you’re told you’re on the wrong side to reach the roof and have to make your way up through the interior of the hotel to get to the roof. It just feels like Free Radical keeps imposing level design which make you go the long way round for no good reason other than to make the game longer. Just when you think you’ve reached your objective the designers force you to take a detour and as a result most of the time spent playing feels like filler material and you only accomplish a dozen or so major objectives throughout the entire game. In addition to throwing roadblocks in your path there are several points where you must find levers to open the door to open the path ahead. Finding levers isn’t a fun mechanic – it’s just a brief hold up. Haze is a short game (about 12 hours) and I wish Free Radical had made it even shorter rather than draw out the levels needlessly. Furthermore the level design isn’t particularly attractive. The overall graphics are nice, but outdoor levels are too sparse while interiors look unlived in. Some props would have gone a long way to making buildings seem more than large empty boxes.

Another problem with the gameplay is that the Mantel soldiers don’t act like an army at all. They’re dispersed throughout all of the areas you come through and act completely independently and never work as a unit. Compare this with Half-Life 2 where the Combine soldiers appear infrequently, but in force and work together as a team to attack you. That’s what makes the Combine army of Half-Life 2 formidable. But when you have Mantel soldiers sprinkled around they become little more than speed bumps along your travels.

It’s a shame that Free Radical failed to notice how well the AI in Half-Life 2 works seeing that they’ve taken a number of cues from that game. Hell, even Merino, leader of The Promise Hand is just a Hispanic version of Eli Vance. More important though is the way that Haze makes use of the same narrative presentation. That is, having all of the in game ‘cut scenes’ viewed from your point of view so that there is no division gameplay and a scene. This can be a great narrative device that was masterfully used in Half-Life 2, but is poorly handled in Haze. Instead of having continuity between gameplay and scripted scenes there’s a brief blackout while you’re repositioned into the vantage point the game wants to you to be in. For example, you’ll be running towards a helicopter one moment and sitting down inside it the next. During the scene you either have no control over where you’re looking or it’s very limited. Essentially, Free Radical do everything they can to limit your control of experiencing a scene when the whole point of the first person narrative perspective is to make the player feel included at all times. The immersion in this game would have been much higher if only they’d let you move freely and trust the player to look at what’s going on. And I haven’t even mentioned the annoying way the camera bobs and sways as though your head is sitting on a spring.

The animation in these scenes is – like most of the game – handled by motion capture. I don’t know why Free Radical would use motion capture when they already have an incredibly talented team of animators who did wonderfully expressive animation for Second Sight. While the motion capture performances are competent, it still has the common motion capture animation problem of giving performances which are too loose and don’t convey anything specific about what a character is feeling. So the character performances are carried largely by the voice actors, who thankfully are pretty talented. Best of all is Sergeant Duvall (Rupert Evans) who becomes the face of hate and senseless violence. There are a number of scenes – mostly with Duvall – which articulate the ideas Haze sought to express. These are the scenes that are filled with visuals that shock and dialogue that makes you question yourself. If only the ideas in these moments were equally well expressed in the gameplay.

Despite Free Radical’s wealth of experience, the multiplayer mode of Haze isn’t very remarkable. The different abilities of the rebel fighters and Mantel soldiers come into play nicely, but overall the multiplayer aspect works well enough – and no more than that. That said, the menu design for setting up matches is horribly unintuitive and the lack of a vertical split screen option is baffling.

I’d been keeping an eye on this game for some time and was able to play two different builds of the game at Game1 and eGames. At the time it was apparent that the game was unfinished and unpolished, so I admired Free Radical when the decided to delay the game for several months. While in those months they did manage to make Haze play a lot better, they still didn’t manage to make Haze the game it could have been. As it is, Haze sits alongside Assassins Creed and Bioshock for its unfulfilled potential. Haze is definitely playable and for the most part it’s fairly enjoyable. But it could have been a great game with an ingenious premise that was well infused into the gameplay that told a story filled with intrigue and immorality. However, they already made a game like that. So rather than spending $100 on Haze you really should go to the trade-in section of your local game store and spend $30 on Second Sight.