Just looking at gamespot I see the following scores...

Dark Sector - 7.5 (listed under Top Games)
Turok - 7.0 (listed under Top Games)
Area 51 Blacksite - 6.5
Haze - 6.0

How many people agree with this order? I don't know exactly where these low scores come from but it is clear to me that someone wanted to bury the game and managed to get cooperation for it across the board. It's not the most amazing mind-blowing game on the planet, but worse than Blacksite? I just don't get it.

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Originally posted by SpiritualZombie:
Just looking at gamespot I see the following scores...

Dark Sector - 7.5 (listed under Top Games)
Turok - 7.0 (listed under Top Games)
Area 51 Blacksite - 6.5
Haze - 6.0

I'd put Turok and Blacksite as roughly equal [they're both awful in their own special ways] below Haze, with Haze below Dark Sector. Dark Sector has issues with a poor first level and two blocks of obvious filler in the middle, but it's quite an enjoyable game.

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How many people agree with this order? I don't know exactly where these low scores come from but it is clear to me that someone wanted to bury the game and managed to get cooperation for it across the board.

It's more a case of the developers' hubris, I think. Nobody seriously expected anything of Turok [nobody who'd played the previous two installments, anyway] and Blacksite pretty much looked to be dreck from the get-go. Haze's pre-release hype included the developers describing making a game like Halo as 'child's play,' a lot of very interesting pre-rendered trailers which turned out to have almost nothing to do with the final game, and claims of a 5,000 page script and a story that 'takes place over three continuous days.' This plus FRD being a well-respected FPS developer with a strong pedigree lead to people thinking they could make good on their increasingly extravagant claims.

What killed Haze's review scores was the developers fostering unreasonable expectations of the finished product. Saying they're a small developer doesn't excuse hideous mis-spending like licensed Korn songs, creating an entire new engine [save using Ageia's PhysX engine, you'll notice the logo when Haze starts] despite not trying anything that couldn't be done in an existing one, long pre-rendered trailers and five thousand page scripts they probably didn't even use a tenth of in the final product. Too much was spent on the hype and not enough on living up to it, and when you dig your own grave it doesn't do to complain about how deep it is.

Incidentally, more evidence of a re-write: originally it was Mantel's missile that destroyed the Land Carrier, not Merino's. The subtitles for that scene include Shane saying 'looks like they did our work for us,' a line which isn't actually spoken. This is easy to believe, since the scene surrounding the Serpent's Tooth is a horrible mess of a thing: Merino's about to leave in the helicopter, that gets shot down, so he thinks, says 'the bridge' and suddenly we're escorting his missile over the bridge he wired for demolition. I felt like the game had skipped over a mission or something.

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