Top Five Most Disappointing Games of 2008

Haze

Publisher: Ubisoft
Platform: PlayStation 3
Full Review Here

Haze – the very name is now somewhat synonymous in the games industry with becoming a victim of your own hype, which is arguably also what happened Spore.

Developed by Free Radical Design – them of Timesplitters fame – Haze was the one big hope for PlayStation fanboys earlier this year, back before LittleBigPlanet and when the platform really needed a universally accessible, top-quality game. Haze was what it got instead.

With players in the role of a soldier in the Mantel Corporation’s private army, Haze attempts to be a story about how the way we perceive the world is manipulated by external forces – in this case a drug called Nectar. Used by the soldiers to get an edge in combat, Nectar also alters how you see the world. Bodies fade from the battlefield, weather conditions seem to change and the world just starts to seem...better.

All of that lasts until the game's mid-point anyway, when your player switches sides in the war and you find yourself working for the rebels in the fight against the Mantel Corporation. Without Nectar, the world looks a lot more grey and washed-out, with blood and guts instead of golden-skies and body-fade.


While that was all very well and good though, the simple fact of the matter was that no matter what point the story is trying to make the gameplay itself wasn’t very good, nor was the moment-to-moment writing up to scratch. There was an appreciable subtext to the action as a whole, but the text itself was limper than an unimpressed stick of celery.

Nor was the gameplay particularly up to much, with the game proving shorter in the tooth than a toddler after a fist-fight, the action tailing off like a...

Haze didn’t fall down on any particular point, nor was it an utterly awful game, but it was totally mediocre and uninspired, coming across as an amalgamation of every other console shooter where the main characters run around in power-armour and have regenerating health – i.e. all of them.

What really killed Haze for a lot of people though was the lack of polygonal power exhibited by the game. The PlayStation 3 is unarguably the most powerful console of the current lot in pure pixel-pushing terms, so you’d expect a PS3 exclusive to make the most of that fact. Haze bucked the trend however by being as lacklustre in this respect as it was in every other. When it wasn’t over-saturating you with bloom effects it was drowning you in the colour brown.

How To Fix It

Haze isn’t disappointing because it’s a bad game in any specific regard, more because it’s a boring game in many regards. The only way to save it then would be to actually go back to the development stage and think of ways to actually spice things up and make them unique.

At the same time though there are some specific flaws that were much-voiced by PS3 fans, such as the short levels, poor graphics and NPC allies who said the same things over and over. Addressing these issues couldn’t hurt.

More than anything though, Haze was a victim of its own marketing campaign. Coming from a talented group of UK-based developers with a reputation for quirkiness and fast-paced gameplay, and with an enticing and politically relevant storyline at the centre, the hope was that Haze would be a step forward for games as a whole. Depressingly though, it couldn’t even be fairly called a step backwards – as a game, it just didn’t feel like it took players anywhere.

Were there other games which disappointed you this year, or have we just got it all wrong? Let us know what you think in the forums or find out what we think of other games in the Gaming Section.