This may be the most disappointing game for the PS3 & is a waste of a lot of potential.
In 'Haze', you play the role of a soldier in the 'Mantel' army. The game is set in the future and instead of having their own armies, countries now outsource their military needs to companies like 'Mantel'. The catch here is that 'Mantel' juices up it's soldiers with a performance-enhancing drug called "Nectar". When you take this drug, it gives you better aim, agility, toughness, speed, etc. You will see enemies glow so they are easier to shoot, as well. Of course, there are obviously downsides to taking a drug of this nature. If you overdose, you will lose your mind and start attacking everything in sight (friend or foe).
Using this drug as a soldier really brings a freshness to the game that you rarely see in this FPS genre. It's an interesting little gameplay mechanic, but that "freshness" wears off quite quickly. This is due to a couple reasons. For one, the game becomes incredibly easy and offeres no real challenge. Secondly, after only a few hours of gameplay you actually switch sides of the war and lose the ability to "juice up".
The reason you switch sides is because of the effects the drug is having on your fellow soldiers. They are cruel maniacs who have lost all moral decision making skills. When you try to tell them what they are doing is wrong, they turn on you and try to kill you. This leads to you joining up with the enemy and you learn why the 'Mantel' corporation needs to be taken down.
The story starts off pretty strong, but then fades into the background as the game goes on. And after the beginning part of you switching sides, the game loses some of it's appeal due to the story going downhill. It doesn't help that 'Haze' has all sorts of technical diffictulties that also hamper it's ability to convey some key emotional moments in the story.
Maybe the biggest disappointment of this game is the terrible visuals. This is supposed to be a "next-gen" game and it looks like it just came out for the PS2/Xbox. Almost everything in the game is sub-standard compared to other games that are coming out these day. Texturing, lighting, pop-up, draw distance, and some HORRID fire effects are just some of the issues.
Then we get to the awful audio of the game. The music isn't too bad, but I never really noticed it. The real crime here is the TERRIBLE voice acting, The dialogue between the 'Mantel' soldiers is just plain awful. And the voice acting that accompanies it is even worse. It doesn't really help when you switch sides, as you will have the same problems but just with different lines of dialogue.
'Haze' does have some thrilling moments when you are just running around shooting, but it does lack in this area too. There are just not enough useful weapons in the game. Both sides have almost the exact same set of weapons (just in different colors), so it gets incredibly repetitive very early on. In fact, the first gun you use in the game (the Assault Rifle) was the same gun I used through most of the game. There is also a shotgun, sniper rifle, mini-gun, rocket launcher, pistol, and a flame thrower (with the worst looking flame effects I have ever seen). This is just lazy development and they needed to come up with more interesting firearms.
While the weapons may not differ much depending on the side of the war you are on, your skills certainly do. While as a 'Mantel' soldier, you can obviously use 'Necar' (as I have already explained). But after you switch sides, you get to use several interesting abilities that you couldn't while working for 'Mantel'. You can "play dead", which is a useful ability as 'Mantel' soldiers can't see you. You can then pop-up and kill them when they are least expecting it. You can also convert any type of ammo into the kind you would need for the gun you are using. Making grenades that explode 'Nectar' is quite handy and fun to use. When you see a group of enemies coming at you, chuck one of these in front of them. When it explodes, they will all overdose and start killing each other. It's pretty humorous the first couple times you do it and saves you a lot of ammo.
Unfortunately, little ideas like that are what make 'Haze' such a disappointment. There is a great game here, but it's stuck under a cloud of terrible graphics, hideous voice acting, sub-par storytelling & glitchy gameplay (the game locked up on me and had all sort of visual glitches). It just seems that 'Free Radical' bit off more than they can chew and finally just had to release the game in, what feels like, un-finished condition. 'Haze' was such a big disaster that it caused 'Free Radical' to close it's doors and they are now owned by another company.
Sometimes hype can be the death of a game (or development company) when you don't deliver on all of the promises. 'Haze' is a great example of that. I think it's worth a weekend rental, at best, but is certainly not worth a purchase. Unfrotunately, 'Haze' will go down as one of the biggest diappointments in the history of the PS3.