[Jobocan]

Yo!
Just came back from playing Haze, the new critically unacclaimed generic console FPS by Free Radical.
So here are my impressions of the game IGN gave 4.5 even though games that look and play exactly the same get scores from 9 to 10.


Graphics
The character models are pretty good and look quite realistic. But they're all either bald or brown-haired. Way to make cool character designs >_> And the costume they're all wearing is look incredibly cliched and... meh. Needless to say i found them to be unoriginal and boring.
The lighting kinda sucks though as sometimes the light shines so hard in a character's forehead you have to stop watching the screen for a few seconds</over-exagerating>.
From far away the environments look awesome, and from close-up it feel like they botched the things a bit. Well it depends on the areas. When there's vegetation it looks meh, otherwise it looks great.
I'll also add that the game is not free from graphical glitches. There's a bunch of them(i can't think of any in particular now) and they're clear as day.

Controls
Let me make one thing clear. Other than Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, i've never liked the controls in console FPS(well, mostly because i suck with them and no matter how hard i try i can't get used to them... MOUSE+KEYBOARD FOREVER). So i'm just making a note here: If you don't like other console FPS because of the controls, you won't like this. After playing it a bit, i must say that if you're good with the controls of other console FPS, you'll feel right at home here. Throwing grenades, moving, aiming, shooting, melee attacks, reloading, using Nectar, whatever; everything works properly.

Gameplay
It's a recent FPS, what more is there to say? It plays like basically every other FPS since Halo.
Now that we got the core gameplay out of the way, let's go to the "unique" element: DRUGS. Nectar is an okay element that makes you aim better, gives a slightly better armor and see who are enemies. Okay, good. But why the hell put that overdose mechanic? That's stupid. Yeah, nothing better than completely losing control of your character and wasting your ammo by making you shooting anywhere you DON'T want to shoot. And if you get shot or hit in the back, you get that overdose automatically. Great. Especially great when you're playing the campaign in multi-player and one of your teammate gets in front of you while you're shooting. That's cool, now you have a crazy bastard shooting everywhere basically trying to kill everything in sight. If there's one thing that's bad in Haze, it's definitely the whole stupid overdose thing.
Another thing i find completely stupid: Holding only 2 weapons. WTF is up with that? Carrying near infinite amounts of guns in like Goldeneye or Unreal Tournament was badass, i could always use the guns i wanted for certain situations. And changing weapons is way too slow.
Also, i feel that melee attacks need more work, it's incredibly hard to hit with them. Shooting people in the face is much more effective.

Multiplayer
Why is there no 4-player multiplayer? That's the stupidest thing ever (yeah, i realize i'm criticizing pretty much every recent PS3/Xbox360 game right now). At least the online is cool and you can get random players to join you during your campaign, and at least there's 2-player. And there are bots. That's awesome.

Other stuff
The voice acting is horrible and the script is incredibly badly written. The worst in this is that you can't skip the cutscenes, and the ones i've seen all sucked ass. Nothing more to say here...


Overall, all i can say is that it's like every console FPS since Halo. I think the game is good, but really i think it's only worth a rental. I, for one, will most likely not play it again.
If you had it up for pre-order at EBgames(at least over here in Canada), you can bring it back for full value in store credits if you don't like it, so at least you're not really losing any money.