Mike Bantick
Monday, 02 June 2008 17:42
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
After a somewhat awkward beginning, the real story of Haze kicks in, with Carpenter stumbling from a crashed post mission lift off. Carpenter wanders the jungle, going cold turkey as his Nectar injector goes off line. Eventually the inevitable occurs with Carpenter joining the “Promise Hand” rebels.
As a rebel, Carpenter can now dodge, set traps, fake death, steal weapons and importantly build Nectar overdose grenades. Lodged into a group of Mantel troopers, a Nectar grenade will trigger an overdose, causing the troopers to go berserk attacking friend and foe.
From this point on, Haze becomes a rather bland, bug ridden ride to the conclusion. Mantel troopers show no intelligence at all, ducking behind cover occasionally, but more often than not, running headlong towards Carpenter, or standing mindlessly in the open waiting to be taken down.
Friendly AI is not much better, with Carpenter’s rebel squad mates - who cannot be given orders – leaping into friendly line of fire like secret service body guards. Also the limited dialogue shouted by friend and foe alike wears thin quickly.
Many missions are broken, with trigger points not set up correctly – this is no HalfLife 2 in mission design. Carpenter runs around slightly bemused, as does the player sometimes looking for the trigger mechanism to keep the mission moving, when all opposition has already been eliminated.
My favourite bug was when, upon checkpoint restart, a quick drive over the hill -in one of the few rather poorly coded vehicles- resulted in the entire world disappearing and Carpenter and his crew plummeting to a digital hell death. Granted this also occurred once to me during Halo 3.
