Or around that range. Haze has the potential to be a solid game but never quite lives up to it, always settling for grinding mediocrity. To break things down, here's a review of the singleplayer only; I know there's a stickied topic for reviews, but there's some notes on storyline to follow and I couldn't see anything saying you have to use the sticky:

Graphics

They're neither as bad as you've heard nor as good as you'd want them to be. The general look of the game is fair to good, but objects tend towards undetailed; the arches of the bridge level are extremely angular, for example. Frame rate is consistent, though there's some rather ugly pop-in, especially regarding 2D scenery objects like bushes. The usual next gen tricks [bloom, motion blur, etc] are all present and correct, including the apparently obligatory snazzy but stupid depth of field effect when you scope a weapon.

Effects are disappointing; smoke and fire are very obvious in their two-dimensional origin, and while some areas feature extensive blood effects, these aren't a gameplay element; when it's visible later in the game, gore is limited to disappointingly small impact puffs. This seems particularly odd in a game where concealing the full horror of war is a theme, since the revealed horror is sorta un-horrible.

Weapon graphics are a very mixed bag: the Mantel weapons tend to be nicely textured and detailed, but the Rebel minigun is a weird-looking tube and their sniper rifle's side is a blurred mess. The Mantel shotgun and Rebel rifle also demonstrate that Free Radical don't know how a reflex sight works.

Of course, we couldn't finish this without the already infamous flamethrower; it's not quite as bad as people say, but it's very much a two-dimensional effect, looking more on a par with the flamethrowers in games like Aliens Versus Predator 2 or Return to Castle Wolfenstein than a modern game.

Sound

To try to get a sense of a real battlefield, Free Radical have set your fellow soldiers to frequently talk to you; however, there's very few lines, and they tend towards being unbearably annoying rather than atmospheric: imagine something like one of the newer Command & Conquer games. Now, imagine there's only one unit, and you're clicking on it every five to ten seconds, for about five hours, and you have an idea what it's like playing Haze. Just to make this worse, the game attempts to establish a sense of urgency simply through having your radio briefing guy nag you constantly, when in fact there's no danger. This results in a 'boy who cried wolf' mission fail on the bridge mission, which I think is the only point in the game where you actually are on a timer.

The game's audio features some truly bizarre sections, such as a speech by one character where four words are beeped out for no apparent reason. The voices are pretty much phoned in, with only Marino really trying to do anything with the series of predictable Orwellian plot twists that form his role.

Weapon and incidental sounds are pretty solid, and the guns certainly sound like guns; the shell wails, vehicle engines, explosions and so on are quite satisfying, with the only gripe being the persistent weird hissing and blooping noises the Nectar administrators make.

Music is ok, but not something that'll have you rushing out to find the soundtrack; there's some embarrassing rap tracks, but otherwise everything fits and nothing stands out.

It's kind of an audio issue to talk about the subtitles: they're oddly chosen and incomplete, and sometimes have relevant information 'drowned out' by background speech. A good example is the observatory, where the irrelevant looped background speech is subtitled and during that section no subtitles are given for the player character, his allies, the enemy, or the briefing guy. There's also some weird errors in the subtitles like referring to Mantel soldiers as 'jacknecks' as a subtitle to a comment that they're 'junkies.'

Gameplay

Ah, and here's where it all falls down. While the graphics are workmanlike and the sounds good as soon as you turn the voices off, things start to go wrong with the gameplay quite quickly. Firstly, the environment in Haze seems oddly slippery, as if the whole world was made of ice. You'll frequently try to walk up a minor incline only to lose control and slide back down it. This means the playable areas of some levels turn out to be narrow corridors of flat ground, surrounded by what amount to invisible rubber sheets. Compounding this is the buddy AI's poor situational awareness; they'll often shove you forward as they try to walk around you, and this can easily set you sliding, or at very least throw off your aim; it's also more than a little strange to be shoved around as if you're on wheels.

This leads into the squad AI, which could charitably be described as dreadful. Your squadmates seem entirely unaware of the world around them and your existence in particular; they'll shove you around, wander into your line of fire, stand near burning vehicles and grenades until they explode, get run over by friendly vehicles moving on fixed paths [we can only be thankful Merino is invincible, since he routinely strolls under a giant mobile ballistic missile launcher on one level], and generally be more of a liability than anything else. Their sole saving grace is they're reasonable shots and are good at spotting enemies, otherwise their presence would be utterly intolerable. Given their repeating dialog, however, you're better off just killing them and going it alone.

The enemy AI fares a little better, with soldiers trying to rush you in groups and using cover moderately well, though they often sit in partially exposed positions just begging to be sniped. The AI seems deeply confused in areas where there's no local cover, though, with enemies often simply standing stock still if there's nothing nearby they could hide behind.

While we're being positive, this game is a shining beacon among games like Turok and Turning Point when it comes to one thing: you can actually customise your controls for once. While you can't map anything to the D-pad and it gets extremely tetchy if you try to map anything to multiple buttons [even in the vehicle controls which have multiple unassigned buttons] it's still miles ahead of the currently oddly popular solution of setting 'shoot' to R2 and then giving the gamer the finger. Aim sensitivity, on the other hand, can't be adjusted at all, supposedly for balance reasons. I'm not sure what form of balance this is supposed to be, but it's the wrong kind; making one side better at aiming than the other is hardly encouraging player skill as the deciding factor.

Obviously in an FPS the make or break part is the shooting, and while Haze features the standard hopelessly underpowered grenades, the rest of the weapons are mostly accurate and perform more or less as you would expect them to, save the strangely awful minigun. There's no mechanism to tell you when your crosshair is on a valid target, which can sometimes lead to you wasting ammo on a target you can't hit [like the Promise soldiers loading Nectar in the first level, who are invincible until the helicopter moves off] or being unsure if you're actually damaging a target [it's never directly stated that rifle fire can kill the Mantel 'tank' and it takes a lot of it]. We'll go for a more detailed breakdown of the weapons and gimmicks in a moment.

The means of ensuring difficulty is one of the most irritating I've seen in a long time: essentially, as soon as you become a Rebel, the enemy can kill you more or less instantly at close range and with one or two shots the rest of the time. This is irritating since ambush generally means death, and feels extremely cheap.

Map design is more or less entirely linear, and often filled with rather arbitrary invisible walls: if there are multiple paths to take, they tend to be more or less the same. There are no real secret areas or hidden things, nor anything much you can interact with that isn't a mission objective. The lack of any real ability to explore or reward if you do is shameful, since it drives home that you're pretty much just walking through a complicated maze. Other than the obligatory exploding barrels, there's not much going on in the levels; a few objects can be shoved or displaced by explosions, and these tend to possess truly bizarre physics. One memorable time I walked slowly into a long table and watched in bemusement as it flipped completely over and landed upside down.

Enemy design is worst; it's completely by the numbers for a pseudo-modern FPS. There's a tank, a buggy, a dropship / gunship, a rocket launcher guy, a sniper, a shotgun guy, and a rifle guy, rounded off by an annoying sentry gun with shoddy hit detection and too many hitpoints. It's this I think that really drags the game down; you're never up against anything you haven't seen a million times before. One thing I really enjoyed about Resistance: Fall of Man was the enemy design, where new enemies ask you to do things the previous types haven't and variety is king. In addition, at least on Normal skill, they're rather sporadic in their use of grenades.

There's not much in the way of a difficulty curve: the second half of the game as a Rebel never really bothers to get harder, culminating in a strangely easy final boss fight that seems to come out of nowhere. While there's some attempt to build up tension regarding the Mantel black ops troops as a fearsome foe, in practice you have a hard time even telling which soldiers they are: they use the same weapons as regular soldier, and are only really distinguished by their inability to overdose.

Gameplay: Weapons

I figured this warrants a separate section since there's some direct criticism to be levelled at certain weapons or choices related to them. All the weapons have silly nicknames in quotes, which I've always found a little obnoxious [the shotgun is called donkey puncher, hurk hurk], but that's hardly a valid in-game criticism.

The inventory mechanic is straightforward Halo: you have two slots for two weapons of any size. For once, the pistol is overpowered enough to actually be worth a slot, since it's a ridiculous hand-cannon rather than an actual pistol. There's an odd interaction with this and one of the Rebel abilities, but we'll get to that later. The two-weapon system isn't something I'm a huge fan of; it tends to force generic enemy design, since the game can't assume that a player is carrying a specific weapon. It certainly does so here.

The summary of the weapons is, put simply, they're boring. While the rifles and shotguns are fun to shoot, the whole list is simply 'place enemy in front of gun and press R1.' There's no room to be creative in combat as a result, and it makes the game overall very drab and samey.

Knife

I never saw a good reason to carry one. I've got a melee attack already and that's a slot a gun could go in, so this is basically this game's version of the useless modern FPS pistol. It's even worse when you realise the average Mantel soldier will kill you instantly at melee range anyway. It can be thrown anything up to several inches, and becomes coated in Nectar while making a Nectar Grenade, allowing you to instantly overdose any Mantel soldier you hit with it. The precise point of doing this when you could hit them with a shotgun and kill them is never explained.

Mantel Pistol

As in Halo, the pistol is more like a mid-range rifle; while Halo's was a semi-auto, this one has such hilarious kickback you might as well consider it bolt-action. Strangely accurate and powerful, it's more or less a cut-down version of the sniper rifles. It's a pity you tend to come across them when you have an actual sniper rifle easily available.

Rebel and Mantel rifles

These two are all but identical: the Rebel gun fires faster and in longer bursts, but carries more total ammo as a payoff and has larger magazines. They're accurate at most ranges, though the lack of a hit indicator means accuracy at extreme ranges is dubious as it's hard to tell what part of the gunsight indicates where the bullet will land. You'll pretty much always be using one or the other, since ammo is common for both. Overall, these really might as well have been a single weapon: there's nothing like the divide in use and function of, say, Resistance's Bullseye and M5A2, which were totally different weapons, and there's no ability to modify them or switch their fire modes or ammo, which is what made Crysis' rifles so much more versatile and fun to use; this is all the more puzzling given the game has no commands bound to the D-pad.

Rebel and Mantel shotguns

Again, extremely similar weapons save that the Rebel shotgun is perhaps the ugliest shotgun design in the history of videogames, looking like a misassembled Warhammer 40,000 gun. Unusually, they're not completely useless beyond spitting distance; this is probably copied from Crysis, which has one of best shotguns ever. You'll probably carry one a lot of the time.

Rebel and Mantel sniper rifles

Probably the biggest factional difference; the Mantel gun is bolt-action and unscopes after every shot, while the Rebel gun is a semi-auto with a lower maximum capacity. Both are stunningly overpowered, with very little scope shake, and kill almost any enemy with a single hit anywhere, at least in Normal difficulty. Since as mentioned below ammo limitation kinda breaks when you become a Rebel, the sniper rifles make large parts of the game a complete joke. It feels rather like cheating at times.

Minigun

A weapon who's chief distinction is that you almost never get to use it, it's surprisingly dull, functioning like an inaccurate assault rifle with a really big magazine. It's not actually particularly powerful, and that coupled to the ugly model makes you wonder if it was just thrown in because there weren't enough weapons. The spin-up time coupled with the fact that weapons briefly stop firing when you zoom them is remarkably good at getting you killed, too.

Flamethrower

More or less a boilerplate FPS flamethrower, it uses fuel absurdly quickly, with the main benefit that it more or less automatically kills anything it hits rather than being HP-draining with a chance of survival. As has been mentioned, the flame effect is probably the stand-out worst effect in the game, all the more so because it's part of a weapon you'll actually want to use.

Rocket launcher

The game helpfully doesn't bother to explain how the lock-on system of this thing works, but it seems to seek a green crosshair placed where you last pointed it while scoping, or try to lock on when pointed at a target while not scoped. The damage is incredibly inconsistent; sometimes it won't even kill an enemy standing next to the target but will launch the target thirty feet into the air. As in Half-Life 2, you're normally handed both the launcher and an infinite ammo source if you're supposed to use it for something, and the lack of splash damage and ammo pickups means it's all but worthless the rest of the time; in other words, it might as well be a mounted weapon with infinite ammo at certain points in the game for all the effect being portable has.

Mounted gun

Slow firing and obscenely inaccurate machine guns with infinite ammo are sometimes placed for your use. They're sometimes very picky about where you have to be standing to use them and sometimes grab you back when you try to leave them, and their slow, inaccurate fire is only made up for by extremely high damage; since as mentioned Mantel soldiers are loathe to use grenades and don't seem able to throw them while still in cover, they also have a hard time dealing with you if you're behind one.

Grenades

The Mantel and Rebel grenades are pretty much interchangeable, both being hard to use due to a tiny blast radius. Nectar Grenades are under the 'gimmicks' section.

Gameplay: gimmicks

The gimmicks in Haze are generally ideas from other games; not many really add to the game, which just emphasises the generic nature of the game.

General

Vehicles

Controllable vehicles are limited to a quad bike, a buggy and a car that's basically the buggy again; in the Halo tradition, there's multiple positions you can occupy, but in single player this is an illusion: the AI doesn't know how to drive, so if you're in any seat but the driver's, they'll sit around stupidly waiting for you to go to the right place. Brilliantly, the vehicles combine fixed, non-healing health [meaning they're less durable than the player is] with a UI that has absolutely no indication of how much health they have; all you have is vague visual cues [smoke] and an alarm immediately before the vehicle explodes. Of course, your NPC teammates don't respond to said alarm, gleefully standing around like lemons until the vehicle blows up and kills all of them. There is, however, absolutely no penalty for getting a vehicle destroyed in any of the vehicle missions; the game just spawns a new vehicle a short distance away, and often a new set of squadmates to go with it.

The vehicles handle bizarrely; it's a task and a half just to take a corner at decent speed, it's often not obvious what you can drive through versus what will stop you cold, and you take disproportionate amounts of damage for mild things like scraping along a wall. The worst part is that your squadmates simply can't shoot to save their lives while the vehicle is moving; in the quad bike mission on the beach, your gunner is so useless you might as well just brave the nagging and do the whole mission on foot.

The only other vehicle sections are brief on-rails segments where you man the grotesquely inaccurate rebel minigun; your role is pretty much to place your crosshair somewhere near the target and hope that the law of averages eventually deals a bullet to your enemy. Of particular note is the last one following the Mantel Land Carrier; it's spectacular in a way the whole game should have been, but spoiled by constantly cutting to a black screen and then jumping your truck to a different position, like you're playing a poorly edited video.

Motion sensor

This is strictly limited to shaking the joypad when something catches fire [vehicles, you]. Much like the Sixaxis melee gimmick in Resistance, this is very much a matter of creating a problem simply so you can solve it, and doesn't add anything to the game.

Mantel gimmicks

The Mantel UI actually features an energy bar, which was a welcome change from the usual regenerating health systems having no accurate indication of how much damage you've taken or how much you have left.

Weapon independent scope

While a Mantel soldier, all non-sniper guns share a common sight which is part of the HUD rather than attached to the gun; this was also an early feature of Crysis. The sight is actually fantastic, providing a clear aim point and not obstructing any part of the screen with the gun model.

Nectar injection mechanic

Injecting yourself with Nectar is done by holding L2, which fills a bar; the more full, the longer it lasts, but if it's filled entirely you overdose and have to put up with a brief period of screen distortions when all enemies and friendlies turn black, the aim point shakes around, and you fire at anything which puts it's hitbox anywhere near your cursor [hilariously, you seldom actually hit anything, which makes you wonder about the game's hit detection]. Unless you have sausages for fingers, it's unlikely you'll overdose more than once or twice during the whole game; it's simply too easy to avoid.

As noted below, the sheer necessity of Nectar means this mechanic is more an annoyance than anything else; it's rather like having a Crysis nanosuit powered by a footpump. You can carry up to six charges of Nectar at any time and steal them from your squadmates if you run out [they don't seem to mind this], but the downside is if there's nobody around to be mugged in this fashion, the administrator takes forever to recharge by itself. If you're actually on Nectar, each kill gives you a little more; thankfully, you can't overdose this way, and it provides some incentive to get in there and kill things.

Nectar perception

Like the Predator's vision mode toggle in AVP2, taking Nectar makes enemies glow brilliantly; however, there's no lock-on functions associated with using it, and unlike the Pred's vision modes you don't gain additional vision abilities like night vision. The flipside is that Rebel soldiers are extremely hard to spot without it, so it's basically essential to be dosed up in all but the most minor of scuffles. Since Nectar doesn't last very long without kills, it amounts to having a set of IR goggles with a ridiculously short battery life.

Melee Blast

Melee attacks are just about tenable when you're a Mantel soldier and failing doesn't result in instant death, but the hit area is far too small to really make them worthwhile and the Rebels tend to move around a lot when you're close to them. While you'll guarantee a kill on anything you manage to hit with a melee attack while dosed up, it's hardly worth the effort, in particular because the result is seeing the enemy slide surreally along the ground like the whole world is an ice rink.

Nectar Resistance

Nectar is essentially a toned-down version of several Crysis powers [for example, the melee boost from Strength but not the high jump, increased grenade throw distance or increased accuracy, while the speed boost doesn't let you switch weapons faster, dash absurdly quickly or jump further] and so it should be no surprise there's a Maximum Armour knockoff here. You take less damage and start to heal faster; the former isn't actually particularly noticeable.

Nectar Focus

This is a moderate extra zoom level that's gradually applied any time you scope while using Nectar and aim at something. Since it takes a while to wind in, it's actually a little annoying, and since the Mantel sections don't feature a lot of long-range combat, it's not something you'll get too attached to.

Nectar foresight

This is the essentially useless ability to see a big glow around explosives; the main problem with it is that you won't be dosed up any time such a thing could take you by surprise.

Nectar...ammo?

An oddity of playing as Mantel is that weapons seem to generate ammo for themselves any time you're not holding them; you'll often find yourself mysteriously armed with more bullets than you thought you had.

Annoying Nectar error mechanic

During the storyline, your Nectar injector will have a series of errors at seemingly random moments. When this happens, you'll be unable to use Nectar even if you shot yourself full of it a second beforehand, and, for reasons that don't even begin to make sense, you won't be able to use the scope on your weapon either. You'll also see things as they really are. Apparently things are really a lot less colourful.

Rebel gimmicks

Annoyingly, the Promise Hand UI has no health bar and overall you have far less health than you had as a Mantel soldier: as mentioned previously, it often only takes a single solid attack at close range to kill you instantly. You have the benefit that your enemies now dress in ridiculous maximum-visibility armour, meaning that while you don't have Nectar perception you don't need it anyway.

Playing dead

This seems to be more of a multiplayer idea since it borders on useless in single player; I've actually had Mantel soldiers shout that I'm not fooling them and keep shooting, so it's not like it's even reliable. It suffers from needing to know the source of damage [sentry guns, for example, will just keep piling shots into you], completely immobilising you, and requiring you to be critically injured before you can try to do it, and amounts to a cloaking device nerfed to the point of being unusable.

Rolling

A mechanic so important I actually forgot it existed at all, rolling amounts to a brief dash in the direction you're currently moving. Since I got through the whole game without doing it once, it's clearly not particularly vital to your continued existence, though I guess it might be handy. For something.

Traps

Traps are slightly useful at times [for example, against Mantel buggies which tend to try to ram you and so can easily be led onto them] but are hampered by the obscenely long set-up time; setting a trap requires you to stare at your feet for a good five seconds while holding L1, which, considering the end result is just a proximity mine, is a little bit much.

Stealing weapons

Imagine Perfect Dark's disarm attack only made a thousand times more unwieldy. Chances are you'll do this exactly once when the storyline orders you to and then never again. Since it requires a successful melee attack before you can steal a weapon, it's just too risky to be worthwhile; a few bullets is hardly worth risking instant death for.

Scavenge

Since they couldn't have every Rebel gimmick be useless, they for some reason decided one of them should break the entire game instead. Say hello to that power, Scavenge. This essentially lets you make ammo pickups you don't need into ammo for the gun you're holding. Yes, that translates directly to 'you never run out of one-hit-kill sniper rifle ammo.' While you only get one sniper rifle shot per ammo pickup, the result is so monstrously degenerate it defies belief at times.

I'm not sure of the precise limitations of Scavenge: it can convert most weapons and I know it can give you pistol, rifle, sniper rifle and shotgun ammo, but not rockets. I haven't tested with flamethrower or minigun ammo. And no, there is no sane or rational way that Scavenge could conceivably work.

Nectar Grenade

You can turn up to two of your stock of five grenades into Nectar Grenades by picking up a dead Mantel soldier's Nectar injector. The result releases a medium-sized cloud of gas that makes any Mantel soldiers caught in it go crazy [for some reason it doesn't seem to affect you]. It's a bit ineffective due to a small blast radius and the tendency for crazy soldiers to fire at walls instead of each other. It also seems to largely remove the blast function of the grenade, making it useless against sentry guns.

It's not a particularly memorable ability: it has it's uses, but overdosed Mantel soldiers are generally all but harmless, shooting at walls rather than becoming the rampaging killing machines you'd think they'd be, so creating them is more a matter of knocking them out of action than seriously endangering their comrades.

Revive

It's hard enough to actually get this ability to work: like mounted guns, the activation area is tiny. In the storyline, sometimes Rebel troops will be injured; unless you revive them they'll eventually keel over and die. Since allies are a renewable resource you don't really have to care, but it's worth it for what the ability actually involves: essentially, you pat the soldier on the shoulder then wave your hand and tell him to stop being such a baby.


Lastability

The single-player experience on the default skill setting is extremely easy [if not a little frustrating given the many sources of instant death] and lasted all of one night, during which I was periodically doing something else. On finishing, I don't seem to have unlocked anything save an extra difficulty level, so I'm not sure there's anything much to go back to. Resistance is my yardstick for PS3 FPS replayability, with its entertaining second-run specific weapons, documents to find and a collection of varied and fun weapons that allow some variety in combat. Here I can go back to get nothing and use the gun that fires the bullets or the other gun that fires the slightly different bullets.

Conclusion

'Meh.'

That's about all there is to it. While we've focused on the faults a lot here, the fact is they don't destroy the game; you'll still have fun running through it, though you'll be annoyed on more than one occasion. You'll laugh at the plot's attempts to be meaningful, wince as the same line is repeated for the hundredth time, and shake your head at the ending. It's doubtful you'll feel any need to play it again, since it just represents the middle of the scale games which like Crysis and CoD4 live at the top of. The only reason it's not a flat 5/10 is featuring an aircraft carrier on tank treads.

Ultimately, everything Haze does has been done before and done better. The few things it does right are offset by the things it does wrong, while the basic gameplay is so generic it feels more like a soulless, pretentious mod with high production values than a new game. So, 6/10.

I think the parts of the story I had the most problems with were [Big, huge spoilers ahead]:

* The container ship. Because:

[1] Why would Mantel load so much incriminating evidence on a single ship, allow it to run aground, and then do nothing about it? Teare specifically says not all of the dead are field soldiers [he points out a drill sergeant] which means they didn't all die here; it's implied through this that the ship is carrying everyone who's ever died from taking Nectar. Why?

[2] How do Mantel manage to cause a ship that's grounded in shallow water to fill with a good fifty feet of water?

[3] What exactly is the point of sending a cleanup squad to shoot Teare if they're going to blow up the tanker anyway? Why haven't they done this already, when there's an artillery gun in a position nearby?

[4] Why is it implied Mantel didn't even know about a ship which couldn't possibly belong to anyone but them? Why is Teare sending a Mantel-standard distress signal if he wants to contact the Rebels? If normal soldiers aren't allowed to go inside the ship, why are Carpenter and Duvall en route to do exactly that before diverting to the Copper Plant?

[5] Teare mentions black ops soldiers are destroying plants to allow Mantel to monopolise the supply of Nectar and protect their profit margins, but this makes no sense since we're never told Nectar has any non-military applications, and Mantel must know that Nectar is killing people, which would quickly lead to massive lawsuits. It doesn't make sense for them to want to monopolise the supply of a drug that isn't particularly optimal as a combat enhancer [it seems doubtful that Nectar is really any help at all to the soldiers that take it given the side-effects make them less capable than regular soldiers], isn't making them any money and has known lethal side effects.

[6] Moreover, Mantel are described as a Private Military Company, so how would they justify deploying when nobody had hired them? Such an operation would be a guaranteed dead-loss for the company; Nectar makes their troops fight recklessly which makes for a high soldier turnover with attendant training and equipment costs, and once again it's never shown that Nectar has any use outside Mantel's own army, which again comes out of the company's pocket.

*The observatory. Because:

[1] Right near the start of the game, 'observatory guard duty' is discussed, as if it's something all the soldiers already know about. If guard duty at the observatory isn't limited to black ops troops, why doesn't everyone know that's where the Administrator is? It's not like there'd be any point keeping it secret, given how possessive Mantel soldiers are about their supply of Nectar: knowing what they were guarding would only make them more eager to defend it.

[2] How was this thing constructed without anyone realising what was going on? At very least, all the parts would have to be flown in and assembled, along with the prefabricated buildings, weapons and so on. As well as this, the entire approach is guarded more heavily than any other location. How could Merino have possibly not recognised this as an important structure?

[3] Why is the Administrator placed here rather than on a satellite, and why is there only one? It's pure lazy plotting to have what amounts to a switch to turn off more or less the entire enemy army. Moreover, why aren't the Black Ops affected by it's deactivation? Why can't the soldiers continue to use their own Administrators manually? Shouldn't the suits have a crash mode that slowly releases the remaining supply if the central signal is cut off, or simply an automatic backup system if the central command signal is cut off?

[4] For that matter, what's the main Administrator actually supposed to do? Nobody's seen operating it, and no reason is really given for this giant dish to exist. If we go by what Teare says, it's essentially doing nothing more complicated than a central heating system's thermostat, so why can't Mantel troops do that themselves? It would just about make sense if Mantel's soldiers were remotely controlled robots [though you'd still expect them to have a crash mode if command was cut off without a valid shutdown being executed, say firing at anything that moves], but not when they're humans. Were they really that desperate for a deus ex machina that they copied, of all things, Star Wars Episode 1?

* The Land Carrier. Because:

[1] The Land Carrier is shown as following her own tread impressions; this implies she's being driven in a gigantic circle constantly. Why have the Carrier in motion if it's not required?

[2] The Carrier is only shown as being capable of launching tiltrotor aircraft that could operate from dirt strips just as easily, and only has short-ranged defensive guns. At no point are we ever given any reason why this thing exists, especially since the Mantel transport aircraft we see are far too large to land on her. There seems no reason why the vehicle would be constantly moving; it's not like she's shown launching long-range missiles or functioning as a mobile artillery battery.

[3] The Land Carrier has no crew and no officers; we never have any real idea who's responsible for her or how Mantel's chain of command operates, or why a Sergeant like Duvall would be adequately trained to not only operate her at a basic level, but also handle command overrides on the never-seen point defence guns she presumably has.

[4] We're never given any idea how she got there or why she was sent: she certainly isn't the right shape to be amphibious, and doesn't appear to have any kind of aquatic propulsion system either. Similarly, Mantel obviously has airfields for their transport planes to use. This is the sort of thing that should have been explained by Merino, rather than having him parrot Duvall [twice!] as if we didn't know what the final plot twist was going to be from the stolen Nectar shipment our idiot player character never questioned him about.

[5] Why does the Land Carrier have two bridge towers, one on either side of her deck? Real carriers tend to keep all superstructure on the same side of the deck, to maximise available deck space. For that matter, why does a helicopter carrier with no conventional aircraft and no catapults have deck-mounted blast deflectors, and why does she have a set astern where they'd be completely redundant since jet wash would go straight off the back of the carrier? Why on Earth does she have two identical radar masts?

All told, I'd rather they spent time dealing with questions like these and avoiding stupid clichés like the on / off switch for an entire army, instead of bashing me over the head with badly thought out philosophy and high school grade musings on the realities of war.