Sounds like I’m about a third through the game here and here are my thoughts on it so far: the graphics are pretty bland, environments are too large and comes off as unimpressive. The story is pretty rote, something something lead character works for the bad guys without knowing it, switches sides once he meets the leader of the rebellion. The main character is largely forgettable and so is the team of alpha male bros he works with. As far as first person shooters are concerned, it’s pretty basic with a twist of “nectar.” The controls are barely explained and the objectives are very unclear at times. This is closer to a 2.5 out of 5 than a 2. So barring some huge change in the next couple hours I have a feeling this rating will stick.

Fumbled.

We are gathered here today not to mourn the passing of Free Radical, but to celebrate the fact that Free Radical once lived. We are, however, here to mourn Haze, which is a middling-at-best shooter whose story carries it until it crashes and burns just in time for the game to end. There is a wonderful, biting, powerful game tucked away inside of Haze's DNA, but it ultimately isn't the version of Haze that we got.

Haze is not an especially good game, which is okay, because Haze is a remarkably interesting game. I have no idea where Free Radical were getting off putting something this explicitly anti-American-invasion in a 2008 Playstation shooter, because the people who would have bought this game at launch would have been the exact kind of people too stupid to understand the sentiment. Six Days in Fallujah got announced the year after this came out. The War on Terror was cool, provided that you were from a certain subset of people who benefitted directly from the War on Terror. That person was the target demographic for Haze, and they weren't ready for it.

But for the overwhelming majority of a playthrough, the interweaving of narrative and gameplay in Haze leaves something like Spec Ops: The Line face-down dead in a ditch. Rather than the systems of play and story being at war with one another as they are in Spec Ops, Haze wants you to find the act of killing fun. Pressing L2 gives you a boost of Nectar, which makes you run faster, makes enemies glow, gives you a little rumble on your controller whenever you get a kill, and gives you an extra little dose every time you gun an enemy down. This encourages fast, aggressive play, always making sure you stay hopped up on Nectar; Nectar makes you better at killing, and killing gives you more Nectar. The actual gunplay is a little lacking, and you've got a remarkably limited selection of weapons, but the ones that feel good to use feel really good to use. Starting you off with a magnum with a report like thunder that practically blows the rebels in half when you shoot them is an inspired choice.

Your squadmates are similarly drugged out of their minds on Nectar, their bloodstreams flooded with enough stimulants to make E3-era Adam Sessler blush. I have to give praise to the writing for making me hate US troops even more than I already did. I imagined what it would be like to be an Afghani or Iraqi soldier, holding a rifle and tucked behind a blown-out brick wall, knowing that my country is being occupied by the stupidest fucking military the world has ever known. A battalion of jackboot dipshits, each of them spouting memes and quoting movies while they unload a hundred million dollars worth of munitions into an empty field. Tens of thousands of morons who never learned that they can breathe through their noses rather than their mouths, all getting into headbutt fights and giggling as they mow down civilians. It's not enough that they're evil, but they're also embarrassing, which might be the worse of the two. Getting killed by them isn't even dignified. It's like losing a footrace to a dog that someone bolted rocket thrusters to. If you also had the rocket thrusters, you'd win every single time, because you're a smart human. But you've got the misfortune of not being owned by a very rich and very committed master.

I'm getting off track. The point is that the narrative is sound, and the gameplay, while stunted, is still operating in harmony with the story. It works even better when you can't kill anything for a little bit, and the Nectar fades, and it becomes very suddenly clear how shit this all is. Not the game, neccessarily, but the act of gunning people down. The music stops playing. The rebels start screaming. You can see their corpses splayed out on the ground after you kill them. You have to commit to hiding and cowering when the bullets start flying, rather than sprinting out into the gunfire with bazookas under each arm and the hardest dick anyone has ever had. It's excellent. It's such a flawless integration of story into gameplay, but it ultimately can't keep it going for the entire runtime.

Free Radical were lined up for an Aaron Gordon backboard-shatterer, but they finished like 2005 Slam Dunk Contest Chris Andersen. The narrative was good for a while, if a little obvious — it was 2008 and you needed to be very obvious to hammer into the heads of Americans that war was bad — but it manages to trip over its own shoelaces by Bioshock Infinite-ing this shit and saying that the rebels are just as bad as the imperial pharmaceutical company invading their country for drug money. To Haze's (very) slim credit, it ends literally the moment before you find out if the entire rebel army is bad, or if it's just their leader. But it leaves a remarkably sour taste in the mouth that Free Radical felt the need not only to pull a punch, but to outright swing in all directions. It leaves you feeling not like this was a pointed takedown of capitalistic expansion and propaganda, but rather that it was Bart Simpson windmilling his arms and declaring that it's every side's own fault if they get hit.

When the narrative falls to pieces, it gets harder to justify excusing the way in which you interact with this world, because it's now clunky gameplay in service of a stupid story. The control mapping is completely unhinged. Losing access to Nectar is fine, but the feign death mechanic that replaces it literally requires you to lay on your back doing nothing for about fifteen seconds before you can get back up and rejoin the fight. Sit there and count fifteen seconds to yourself before you read any further. It's that long. You will be doing this multiple times per shootout. Black ops soldiers who are immune to Nectar frenzies get introduced, meaning that the only way to deal with them is to abandon your fun weapons and settle for whatever bullet hose gets the most rounds downrange the fastest.

At some point while playing a game and getting frustrated with some design decisions, you start wondering what the developers were thinking. This is a dangerous line of thought, because it's one bred from anger; the answer is almost always that an "obvious flaw" was something they were either compelled to include or forbidden from removing, often leaving the blame on the shoulders of the publisher. But no, Free Radical seemed genuinely pleased with every aspect of the game they released. They made their own graphics engine and proudly declared that the game was locked at 30 FPS because first-person shooters don't need to run at 60. It looks like shit, too, so it's not like this was a compromise being made for visual fidelity. Truly and honestly, what the fuck were they thinking?

Here's the Psychbomb cut of Haze. For one, we cut out the stupid subplot about the rebel leader secretly being a bad guy. Yes, there's historical precedent for opportunists rising up against tyranny during times of crisis and themselves becoming tyrannical, but that's not the character that we've been dealing with for 95% of the runtime. Get rid of the evil all along twist and keep him otherwise as is. Focus a bit more on the individual rebels, too; just as you had a squad of Mountain Dew-chugging bros in the first act, give us a squad of principled guerillas in the next.

Secondly, Nectar remains a factor for the whole game. We drop the whole "feign death" mechanic. Carpenter stays hopped up on Nectar and remains clad in his glowing armor and turns it back against Mantel. We recontextualize this in the second act not as a cool power-up, but as a twisted, tragic bit of neccessity. We make a shift over to guerilla tactics, focusing on traps and sabotage and making Mantel soldiers overdose on Nectar so that they kill each other, and we bust out our own Nectar boost in times of great crisis when there are no other options. We do an Edgerunners thing, basically; Carpenter is addicted to the Nectar, he knows it's going to kill him, but he can't stop taking it because it's his nuclear option that he needs to bust out against Mantel when shit really hits the fan. Mantel soldiers hopped up on Nectar should be borderline-unkillable juggernauts that need to be outwitted and not outgunned as they are in the current game.

Lastly, rather than the rebel leader accidentally firing a rocket at the carrier while you're still on it and then coming in with a helicopter to extract you, Carpenter volunteers to sacrifice himself. The Nectar is going to kill him within days at best no matter what he does, and he opts to do something truly good in his final moments. He busts out every dose of Nectar he has, rampages through the carrier in a horrifying whirlwind, slugs it out with his former squad leader just as he does in the current game, and makes sure that the carrier blows up with him and every other Mantel soldier in it. The Promise Hand clean up the rest of Mantel, successfully defend their homeland, and then burn down the Nectar fields so that nobody can ever use them again.

Sure, this one ends a little white savior-y rather than both sides-y, but there's no reason we can't just make it so Carpenter's ethnic background is from the same country he's invading. He's a fucking nothing character in the current game, so why not? It'd introduce some cognitive dissonance where he has to square what he believes or knows about his ancestral country with what he's being told about it. That's solid motivation for him to be hesitant and kick off his squad's doubts about his commitment to Mantel. It might not be a perfect idea, but I'm confident that it's better than the narrative we have here, brought to you from the same mind who gave us the stories of The Division and Rambo: The Video Game.

But now I'm writing fix fics for Haze, which should be the ultimate sign that I'm too far gone.

This might be the most well-known pieces of box art for a game that nobody played.