More Haze reviews, just in time for the US release today, the UK release is still Friday.
Gamespy – 4/10
It’s clear from the bare-bones multiplayer, glitchy graphics and incredibly short storyline that Haze is a game interrupted. Discussion of whether Free Radical did not anticipate the difficulty of building a next-gen engine or whether it ran out of resources is academic at this point, because we can all see that Haze is not finished… not graphically and not narratively, either. For a much-hyped, blockbuster PS3 exclusive, Haze does very little to endear itself or the PS3 to anyone.
Gametap – 6/10
Haze is a pretty textbook case of “goals far outreaching grasp” in the dictionary of writerly clichés. There are many great ideas within Haze, they just happened to be trapped in an extraordinarily mediocre game. I have a lot of respect for Free Radical, and am hoping that Haze’s mediocrity is a fluke. Hopefully this merely adequate turn means that the studio’s upcoming TimeSplitters 4 turns out to be brainmeltingly awesome to compensate.
GiantBomb – 4/10
Playing Haze left me disappointed, for sure, but it also left me extremely curious about its development. Free Radical, the developers of Haze, have done better in the past in almost every single way possible, from weapons, to levels, to bot intelligence. Though it was announced just over two years ago, the end result plays like something that was slapped together and shipped after a year or so, rather than something that was painstakingly developed and refined. While there’s nothing about Haze that’s out-and-out broken or completely terrible, it doesn’t come close to meeting the expectations that today’s first-person shooter market creates.
Kotaku
There’s really no reason to recommend Haze over similar titles in the PS3 library. The game feels less polished than it should, seemingly “good enough” for release after suffering multiple delays. The story is forgettable, the weapons nearly indistinguishable and the seemingly strong concepts so poorly implemented that you’ll have a hard time convincing three of your friends to drop whatever else they’re playing for a co-op slog through the thing.
Remember, kids, reviews are one man’s opinion only, as Ubisoft’s Community Developer, Wuzzi, points out: ‘One thing I can already tell about the reviews is that most of the time they are the opinion of only one person and may not reflect the way you will see the game: you have to make your own judgment.‘
Funny, we didn’t hear that when the Famitsu review popped out.