quote:

We tell you why Free Radical's shooter is one of the best of this generation.

by Michael Thomsen

US, May 27, 2008 - Contrarian Corner is a feature on Insider meant to take a more critical look at some recently-released games. The average review tends to treat a game as an objective product, evaluating its merits based on a series of frequently technical categories, like sound, framerate, gameplay interface, value, variety of modes, and overall fun factor. This typically doesn't leave much room to look at a game's thematic elements or how well they are integrated with the game's technical components. To that end, Contrarian Corner is intended to be a place for a more holistic discussion of games which have been the recipient of either an abundance of single-minded praise, or an undue amount of criticism. Our intent is not to contradict or undercut our own reviews, but rather to expand the spectrum of discussion on some of the most important games of each year. If you're interested in joining that discussion, keep reading.

Be forewarned if you haven't finished the game, spoilers will be discussed.

"Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law."
-- King Richard the Third - V.iii

If games are a communicative art, how can you understand gameplay? How can interacting in a game world communicate an experience that is thought-provoking and expressive? In Haze, Free Radical has committed to taking the traditional gameplay mechanics of a first-person shooter and putting them in a context where they can actually mean something. Most first person shooters cast players as the reluctant hero, stoically razing wave after wave of dehumanized villains, either ethnic stereotypes or imaginary alien races. The theme is always one of simple empowerment, providing a stark setting where grim expressions of masculine violence are the only solution to cartoonishly dire scenarios. In the span of fourteen missions you've got to destroy a super weapon, stop an alien invasion, and occasionally save your squad-mates before being greeted with a hero's welcome and a videogaming heart of valor during the end credits.

Haze is a brilliant rebuke of the jingoistic formula that advocates violence as a gameplay mechanic without serious consequence. Haze isn't an empowerment fantasy but a black-hearted satire in which violence isn't the key to saving the day but, rather, the engine that drives the protagonist to the very bottom of his gradual downward spiral. It accepts the gameplay mechanics of a traditional FPS but frames them in a way that makes success anathema to victory. The more the player wins, the more lost they become in the tangle of cruelty and delusion.
Life on Nectar.

In the opening levels of the game, Haze encourages the player to treat the game as a traditional hero story sending Shane and his squad mates on a mission to eliminate a rebel leader known as Skincoat, based on a reputation for wearing the skin of his victims. Immediately, however, the game undercuts the moral rectitude of the mission by surrounding the player with a squad of adrenalized alpha males whose delight in causing pain and suffering directly mirrors the villainy of the man you're supposed to be chasing. As you listen to your squadmates cry out in glee "This is the most fun I've had with my pants on," every time they kill a rebel soldier, it's impossible not to feel like you're marooned in the middle of the jungle with a frothing group of psychotics. It's impossible to see the difference between a man who treats human remains as fashion accessories and your own teammates who so eagerly announce their conflation of sex and murder.

How many games can you think of where the first three hours of play are spent making you increasingly uncomfortable about your actions? How many games open with the protagonist connected at the hip to frighteningly unhinged alpha males whose violent outbursts frequently veer into open masochism? Playing the first three missions in Haze is a revelatory experience in which players gradually come to understand that they are in the position of the villain and there is no excuse for the cruelty of their actions. Free Radical has built this theme directly into the gameplay with Nectar, in which the players give themselves a temporary power boost by administering a drug. Now instead of having to confront the enemy as human beings, they become abstract orange silhouettes, faceless and voiceless against the tangled jungle backdrop.

Nectar allows the player to reduce each mission to its most abstract and detached level, where you are no longer killing human beings for a specific cause, but simply eliminating highlighted obstacles from an arena. In another brilliant stroke, players are taught to mistrust their partners from the outset as your squad mates will occasionally overdose on Nectar and start shooting you in the back. In a game about the illusory context of good and evil, being shot at by your teammates is a terrific use of a familiar concept (team killing) to communicate something thematic: you are riding with the devil.
Life without Nectar.

The game continually teases players with the prospect that they are not seeing everything as it really is, offering quick flashes of rooms filled with dead bodies and blood splattered on the austere uniforms of your teammates. In the factory level just before players finally track down Skincoat, a drop in Nectar levels actually reveals that it is raining and gloomy outside. When the nectar comes back into effect, players see the environment with bright sunlight and a cheery blue sky. Where traditional shooters like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 open with having players trying to figure out the mystery of what their enemy is plotting, Haze encourages self-reflection. The enemy remains static, while the real mystery is focused on what exactly are the "good" guys trying to accomplish. In a genre where violent interaction is a defining necessity, Haze's ability to involve morality directly into its shooting mechanics is an extraordinary achievement.

Just when you're level of distrust for your fellow soldiers and the valor of your own cause is coming to a head, the game throws another striking turn your way in the confrontation with Skincoat (or Merino). Merino offers the player a convincing explanation for all of their misgivings and lays the seeds for Shane's eventual switch from Mantel Corp. to the rebel faction. "They feed you stories about your enemies to make you hate them. To give you the confidence to shoot them. To make you believe that you are a hero…My friend, there are two sides to every war. Are you sure you're on the right one?" Now Shane has a convenient invitation to exorcise all his feelings of discomfort and moral outrage against the same soldiers he once fought alongside.

After deciding to turn on your former allies, Shane is stripped of all his Nectar abilities. Now the game shifts towards a more traditional shooter in which players can take up the role of heroic savior leading a ragtag group of rebels against the improbably well-equipped invading army. The grand metaphor for the rebel group is the image of a hand, which you'll see graffiti'd everywhere as a symbol of solidarity for the Promised Hand faction. While you may want to get carried away down the delusional path to becoming a hero of the Promised Hand, there are just as many disturbing experiences to be had as a rebel. One of your first acts in the village that serves as home base for the Promised Hand is to kill your old squad mates in a close quarters combat.
Hunt the pig. It deserves to die.

While there is nothing inherently sympathetic or likeable about your former team members, you are forced to confront them at close range with the revolting sound effects of bullets piercing flesh. As a Mantel soldier you only heard the firing of your gun and the cries of your teammates, but here, for the first time in the game, do you get a full audio-visual portrait of the consequences of your shots-fired. Whatever rhetorical justification the rebels may give you for killing the "junkies" and "invaders" the game's soundscape tells you there is still more to the story with its nauseatingly vivid rendering of bullets hitting flesh. The absence of these sound effects earlier in the game underscore their disturbing impact as now Shane is fully awake to just how much of a savage killer he really is, justified cause or no. The game's score further suggests the continuing conflict as every ascendant theme begins to suggest a heroic motif, dissonant notes are thrown in to create doubt and tension. The suggested discomfort is palpable, almost synaesthetic, as you guide Shane further through his killing spree.

As a rebel you'll eventually disrupt the flow of Nectar to the Mantel soldiers and be confronted with the sad sight of your former partners going into withdrawal, turning on one another, and revealing themselves to be dependent pawns. If you've been paying attention you'll see the final twist of Merino's plot to use Nector to shore up his own authority coming a mile away. There is simply no other way for the game to conclude. Haze isn't about heroism and achievement in the face of great difficulty. It's about the human capacity to destroy and be cruel to itself. The image of the hand sprayed everywhere serves as a constant reminder that action is what defines us, not the mellifluous rhetoric of Merino, nor the authoritarian propaganda of Mantel. We are what we do, and in a gameplay environment where aiming and shooting is the primary option for interacting, we are heartless animals no matter what side we fight for.

Haze is, of course, an imperfect game. The AI is largely inconsistent, sometimes using team tactics to draw players into tight quarters before bull-rushing them with a heavily-armored shotgun soldier, and other times standing alone in a corner firing at a wall for no reason at all. The level design is also a bit obtuse in places, leaving players in sprawling levels with little indication of where they're supposed to go next. Many of the indoor environments are disappointingly empty and devoid of residential flourishes of lived-in functionality. This will undoubtedly frustrate players coming to Haze looking for another rendering for the shooter as a tactical chess match. Compared to games like Gears of War or Halo 3, Haze offers a relatively simple and sometimes repetitive tactical experience.
It's easier to do when you can't see their faces.

Some have complained about the low-fidelity visuals in Haze and it's true that there are plenty of blurry textures and pop-in. Once you get past the technical issues, however, you will discover a game whose naturalistic color palate is among the most realistic and lushly realized in any current-generation game. Character models are likewise well-detailed and Mantel Soldiers have an appropriately fetishistic slant to their rubbery black uniforms. The environments themselves are also admirably sprawling and compensate for the lower-level of texture detail with scale and the relative lack of loading screens. Haze may not be the most technically impressive game, but its art and color design compare favorably with most shooters on the market.

Finally, Haze isn't about texture resolution or AI. It's about giving players an irreplaceable experience of feeling guilty for the consequences of their actions. It's a startlingly engaging game because it has the courage to not forgive or justify any of the misdeeds you will be forced to carry out in the single player campaign. Haze has taken all of the thematic conventions of shooters throughout the years and stripped them of moral equivocation. When you come to the end of any story in which you have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people you are a monster, even if you had the best of intentions. Haze allows the player to feel that sense of regret, futility, and moral vacuousness at the heart of a game built around repetitively firing a gun. It does so with a black-hearted sense of irony, not unlike Heinlein's Starship Troopers, that is as harrowing as it is subversive. If shooters have taught us to be avenging heroes over the course of the years, Haze is an inspiring break from tradition, showing the long, circuitous path to failure and destruction. Let's to it pell mell. If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

Haze FAQ - please check first if you have a question about Haze.