Making a name for yourself in a particular genre can hurt you in the long run. Not every single title you make will live up to this particular reputation, and those that do not make the grade can tarnish an otherwise perfect record. Haze has placed such a burden on the acclaimed development team at Free radical, who have worked on Golden Eye 007 and the Perfect Dark, as well as establishing the acclaimed Time Splitters franchise. Even though Free Radical’s previous work was excellent, Haze appears as a generic first person shooter, with a weak plot.

Shane Carpenter is Haze, a young Mantel soldier who is dispatched, along with the rest of his squad, to the South American region of Boa. With the largest PMC in the world, Mantel has an army of enhanced warriors boosted with their specialized “supplement” known as Nectar. Which has a large force at its disposal, Mantel is task with going in to pacify the region from the dangerous Promise Hand, a militant group of rebels headed up by the villainous Skin Coat, who is so called because of his tendency of skinning his victims and wearing them. It turns out that Mantel finds that his mission to liberate the indigenous people is not what it appears to be and after one objective takes an unexpected turn, he defects to the rebels and began to fight his squad mates.

From a gamers perspective this appears to be an interesting premise for a title, which give players a sense of both side of the conflict. Sad to say, the plot is a feeble amalgamation of concepts that the true impact that could have been presented in the title is lost. The Mantel soldiers are presented as though the have not morality rather the are only interested in killing people because they have always had a thirst for death and destruction.

However, Carpenter isn’t ever presented with these emotions, regardless of the action he faces or the amount of Nectar in his system. This makes him stand out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of his unit and immediately weakens the player’s connection as to why they want to even play through these sections. What’s more, the character of Carpenter doesn’t endear himself to the player, especially because he either whines his way through sections of missions or seems perpetually lost, making him come across as exceedingly weak and not someone you want to take through the entire game regardless of what happens to him. It doesn’t really help in the middle of battle, when you’re dodging bullets or rockets from your former company, to hear Shane complain about not being sure what to do next.

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