Haze's narrative is really cool, actually. A lot of people give Spec Ops: The Line credit for being the first game to really deconstruct the uber-patriotic, gung-ho military-nationalist psychopathy that had become present in games ever since the preset set by Modern Warfare 2 (ironic, given that COD4 had a staunch anti-war and anti-Bush message in the form of the fantastic nuke scene), but to my memory, it was actually Haze that was doing this even before MW2 even came out. The plot seemingly revolves around a conflict between the Mantel supersoldiers and the Promise Hand rebels, but in actuality, the plot actually revolves around Nectar, a drug that turns you into a killing machine at the cost of chipping away at your humanity.

The fact that Mantel's supersoldiers are actually a bunch of college frat boy psychos was a pretty brilliant decision - not only does it give Haze a kind of satirical undercurrent of black comedy, but it makes the message actually somewhat profound. They may be crazy frat boys, but they're just that, dumb college kids that were forcibly given a powerful drug that made them way stronger than they were ever equipped to handle, and it turns them into apex-predator monsters. Mantel isn't even fighting the Promise Hand out of any sense of xenophobia or anything, they just want the fields that the Promise Hand fight on because they can produce more Nectar in these fields. The war is just an excuse to engineer more wars, and like-- fuck, that's actually so cool, man! The fact that the main villain's final words are "don't tell my mom" (one of my favorite famous-last-words quotes in like, anything, ever) is not only incredibly sad and humanizing, but a genuinely profound anti-War message that ties beautifully into the game's themes.

Yeah, too bad the game is fucking shit, because the narrative rocks. But the game plays like trash. 2/5.

Reviewed on Jun 04, 2022


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