Haze had the potential to be great, but fell so short, you'd think it was intended to be an episodic pre-alpha build.
To its credit, the game starts out strong. You play Shane Carpenter, a Mantel Global Corp soldier that is attempting to suppress a rebel group from stealing your Nectar, the drug that makes Mantel's soldiers superhuman. For the first act of the game, you fight alongside some of the most obnoxious AI characters ever created. Constant irritating commentary become the first noticable flaw in the game, and will make you loathe having help. Luckily, at some point, a plot "twist" forces you to side with the rebels, stripping you of the abilities you incorporated into your strategy. Now you are left with a set of abilities (such as play dead and infuse grenades with Nectar) which I found severely unsatisfying, especially after enjoying the damage resistance and enemy highlighting that an injection of nectar gave you.
The AI in Haze does not exactly earn the "I" in the acronym. This painfully stupid device causes enemies to simply run past you, ignore you completely, shoot wildly (often times making your best defense simply walking through and "bunkering" the enemies), and quite frequently, clip into walls and doorways, sometimes impeding progress. For your teammates, the AI seems to really only control their banter. They are as worthless as the enemy in combat. In one instance, the driver of a friendly vehicle I was escorting across a bridge simply ran over me as I was taking aim.
In all honesty, I feel I should cut the review off right here, giving the game as incomplete a review as the developers gave gamers an incomplete game. After about the third level or so, you will begin to overwhelmingly discover just how unfinished the game feels. As you advance through a Promised Hand village, you'll be able to take paths that simply act as a dead zone, where no enemies or teammates will spawn, venture into, or even see. Other instances, you'll "reenter" the map from one of these dead zones and actually watch the enemy pop-in, spawning seemingly out of thin air. This is usually accompanied by the inevitable clipping through a wall, or getting stuck in a doorway, allowing you to just walk up to them and blast them in the face. The story had potential, but god-awful presentation and buggy game mechanics quickly distract the player from the plot.
Multiplayer consists of both cooperative and competitive modes. However, due to the almost instantaneous flood of horrible reviews, the online community feels very tiny. I've waited for extended periods of time to find a suitable game. The competitive game consists of the standard deathmatch/team deathmatch, and an assault variant. None of these gametypes stand out among the vast amount of feature-rich FPSs available on the market today. The Nectar gimmicks only work to unbalance the two sides. On the Mantel side, you'll find youself quickly emptying a clip into dead bodies just to make sure they truly are dead. On the Promised Hand side, you'll most likely be using your effective abilities to annoy the other side. The dodge and feign death tend to greatly overpower most players on the Mantel side of the fight, limited to simply highlighting the attacking enemy as he simply strafe and dodges incoming bullets.
Cooperative play, for the most part, redeems one half of the game's AI issues. However, there are points where scripted events make the added player feel like a burden the game didn't plan for.
Overall, I feel dirty giving this game a positive (as in greater than zero) review. But in all honesty, there have been worse games out there. The game had great potential, but it feels like the staff was in the middle of the second or third level and were promptly replaced by a scab crew of monkeys flinging poo at a keyboard to finish out the game's later acts. Irritating level design, insanely programmed AI that presents very little challenge, and voice-acting so irritating I purposely gave it a one sentence blurb in the review drag this game to the bargain bin so fast you'd think its title was referring to the remnant shape left on the shelf where it was located for the first hour after launch.