About five or so minutes into playing through Haze, I found myself having to put down the controller so that I could rush to my mobile phone to capture some video footage on my little camera for posterity. As a games reviewer a lot seems to pass my retinas as the hours tick into days and the days become weeks, but it’s a fairly rare occurrence that I actually go out of my way to show other people those little ‘wow’ moments that the occasional title throws my way. The fact that Haze managed this within five minutes would have been great had the reason I was doing it not been so depressingly, I-want-to-smash-my-head-repeatedly-against-my-television bad.

If I am honest, not all of PS3-exclusive Haze is quite as bad. The general plot – a man fighting for the evil Mantel army whose soldiers are controlled by a type of drug suddenly realising that he’s on the wrong side – shows a bit of early promise, and the general gameplay itself is pretty solid if unspectacular. It’s the kind of game that, had it popped up amongst a release schedule in, say, 2005 would have been somewhat great, but technology and standards have moved on since them. Sadly, developers Free Radical – of GoldenEye (well, kind of) and Time Splitters fame – seem to have stood stock still as time has passed on by.

The first inkling that there may be a few issues with Haze kind of slaps you in the face the moment the game starts, although having to do a 4 gig install to play the thing isn’t exactly laugh-a-minute stuff either unless you have a fetish for loading screens. As soon as the game fades into life with your lead character standing about some burly-looking marines you become aware that the whole thing seems to have been hit with the ugly stick; in actual fact, the thing runs at 576p and has to have the hardware upscale it to get any kind of HD loveliness going on. Hum.

This may not have been so much of an issue had there been some solid texturing and modelling going on, but Haze’s other graphical issue is that it somehow prevails upon itself to look somewhat like a pretty decent PS2 shooter rather than an all-swinging PS3 graphical feast. Character models look angular and dated, water and lighting effects seem fuzzy and uninteresting and the texturing might as well have come out of a swatch book of textures from the Meh Texture Factory. The cherry on this rather depressing cake is that the game is locked at 30fps, which you could have understood if the game looked like it might tax the hardware. As it is, you feel like Haze strains the hardware about as much as an old woman who only gets up to second gear would stretch a Ferrari F430.

Of course, all this graphical grumbling would have been mostly offset if Haze had then gone on to slap excitement and enjoyment across our faces with the stick of fun; any fan of the Rainbow Six series would be able to argue successfully that naff graphics do not have to ruin a decent shooter. Sadly, at no point during Haze’s campaign story do you ever get the feeling that what you are doing is particularly unique, with it falling directly into being a classic run-and-gun with a few driving sections, puzzles and tweaks.

It’s one of these tweaks – the use of Nectar, the drug that Mantel corporation soldiers are plied with – that could have actually made a significant bit of difference to the experience had it been used properly. The first few levels see your character – Shane Carpenter, if you must know – given the ability of releasing and influx of the drug into his system via a press of the L2 button, with the resultant effect being somewhat akin to the feeling you get after downing four cans of Red Bull, two cups of coffee and some Lucozade tablets and then going paintballing. Enemy soldiers suddenly start glowing rather obviously to give you an easier time with aiming, your reactions, movement and reloading times are sharpened up immensely and your strength is given a big boost should you wish to introduce anyone to the butt of your weapon. It’s a neat little feature, and the fact that you can overdose and go off into an uncontrollable shooting spasm that Rambo would be proud of works as a decent risk/reward mechanism.

This is all well and good, but it all becomes somewhat redundant about a third of the way through the game when a particular series of events leads to you losing your Nectar powers and never regaining them. In one sweep the main hook – the main USP – of Haze is wiped from the menu, and although you are offered a few abilities unique to the situation you find yourself in, it all falls rather flat and doesn’t distinguish itself from any other FPS title.

Other problems continue to rear their head. Remember way up there at the start of the review when I mentioned that I had actually recorded a section of the game through sheer amazement at what I was seeing? This was due to one of my AI cohorts wandering haphazardly in to a small fire near a crashed plane and standing in the bloody middle of it gasping and screaming in agony… until I moved myself some three minutes later. Depressingly this was just the tip of the iceberg; enemies and allies proved alarmingly fallible and all too willing to run around aimlessly shooting or failing to take any sort of self-preserving cover at all, obviously much to the detriment of the overall experience.

This overall experience is further tarnished by issues such as cutscenes failing to trigger at specific points for no reason. The very first level of the game sees you having to track down a pilot of a crashed plane, with a small scene kicking off when you do. Problem was, first time I came across this happy scenario I stood around for ages whilst my AI chums ran around the forest shooting butterflies and as a result became somewhat bored, so I walked off and ended up falling off a cliff. Having reloaded, I then ran toward the pilot and managed to trigger a cutscene by doing nothing that was remarkably different, prompting much furrowing of the brow and grumbling in a low voice. My flatmate thought it was amusing at least, but then again he was probably already drunk by that stage.

The main problem with Haze, though, is just how average it feels to play. In one particular scene a man you are chasing manages to evade you by taking a moving platform across to the other side of a vast room, leaving you rather stranded. What would you do in this situation if you were an ass-kicking, drug-boosted army man? Scout out an alternate route? Make a leap for it? Use your powers to blow something up and make a new tunnel through? Think again chap – you end up pootling to the other end of the room, flicking a switch to make the platform return to the place it started, walking all the sodding way back and then getting on it and riding it over. I'd say this is exciting stuff, but then I'd be an utter tool.

Resisting the urge to frisbee the disc out of the PS3 disc slot and into the nearest bin I foraged on, arriving at a portion of the game where you are required to drive a buggy across a series of exploding roads. This proves somewhat tricky due to the handling of the vehicles being twitchier than a dieting fat man in a bakery, and the countless resulting deaths from being battered by falling rocks, exploding mines and enemy fire really begins to drag after a few thousand attempts. In a further vehicular section later on, an attempt to dodge a tree root with my quad bike ended up with it being lodged against a wall and rendered completely unsalvageable for no apparent reason, which lead to an annoying moment where my leader informed me that ‘walking will take too long – take the bike”. Yes, how about you SHUT THE HELL UP.

The saddest thing about Haze is that you can see, whether it be the core gameplay or the story, what they were trying to do, and that makes it all the more unfortunate that it’s fallen so short. The story is probably the prime example of this in the way that it tries to paint some kind of rich tapestry of good and evil meeting and the line in the middle becoming somewhat blurred, and in places it actually threatens to get somewhat interesting and offers up a pretty cool moment when you take your first look at things without Nectar and see them for what they really are/ It certainly tries a heck of a lot harder than the Halo series ever managed at giving players a twisty turny interesting plot that actually makes sense, but it’s all undone by some of the most annoying script and dialogue moments ever.

The examples of this are numerous and rather amusing, but if I had to repeat too many of them I would probably make myself physically ill and possibly end up blowing chunks all over the keyboard. At the beginning of the game when Shane is still with the Mantel corporation his squad mates fall into the classic boo-yah American army stereotype, with each conforming to classic film staples; one is the gnarled, aggressive captain, another is a somewhat stupid, gung-ho type who talks as if he’s just wandered off his parents’ farm somewhere in the deep south. Thankfully their presence is somewhat limited after the first few sections, and with epic comments such as ‘IT’S LIKE TAKIN’ CANDY OFF A CRIPPLED BABY!’ and ‘SHOW ME THE NEAREST KICKABLE ASS!’ it’s somewhat relieving. Oh, and whoever decided that it would be a f**king great idea to f**king well have the marines use the word f**k every other f**king word to give them some sort of f**king* adult edge should be f**king punched.

It’s pretty safe to say, then, that the single player asset of Haze is no great shakes. It’s not a huge stack o’ cack by any means, but it certainly isn’t a good effort either. The loss of the Nectar powers a short while into proceedings most certainly doesn’t help matters, and although the story twitters on and promises to be quite good on the odd sporadic moment it ultimately shoots itself in both feet. Add in some over-long cutscenes that completely wrench you away from any feeling of momentum that the game tries to pick up and you’re left with something short and not particularly sweet, even with a four-player online co-op.

Once more the game is given a chance to redeem itself with some decent multiplayer offerings, yet once again Free Radical have fallen way short. Across a series of pretty uninspired maps you are offered but three game types: standard one-on-one and team deathmatch, and the rather more interesting Team Assault. The latter places the players – 16 being the maximum – on either the Mantel or rebel side of the coin and tasks one side with achieving an objective whilst the other simply needs to stop them. I would carry on with a few other features but that’s your lot, and although it’s pretty solid and lag-free it is harshly underwhelming given Call of Duty 4 and the like.

It’s all rather puzzling how this situation should have arisen, really. Free Radical have the pedigree and have had plenty of time to churn out something interesting on a machine that’s already shown it can showcase some rather lovely visuals, but they’ve missed the mark completely. Whether it’s a one-off given their unfamiliarity with the hardware remains to be seen, but for now it’s pretty safe to assume that anyone wanting a thrill-a-minute FPS game for their PS3 with beautiful visuals and an epic story should save their money and play something else instead.