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Game Review: ‘Haze’

Gamers everywhere were tickled in the early 2000s when a certain blue-blooded New York newspaper began running stories that asked, “Are video games art?” The answer, of course, is no, but that hasn’t stopped high-minded publishers from offering high-concept games meant to be taken as seriously as novels or movies. A few of them succeed, like the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise, but many fall short.

The new first-person shooter “Haze” belongs on that pile of ambitious failures, with a captivating concept and commendably rich story line — for a video game — poorly served by its irksome game play and subpar graphics. I wanted to like “Haze.” The advance online hype made me look forward to it, but for all its comparatively sophisticated meta-trappings, the overall experience was less than the sum of its parts.

The game takes place in 2048, when a squad of wisecracking mercenaries has been dispatched to South America to put down a local insurgency. Kitted out with all the latest future-war gear, they’re also all hopped up on a performance-enhancing drug called Nectar. Nothing could go wrong with keeping a team of killers-for-hire wired on mega-crank, right?

Well, no, lots of stuff goes wrong.

I’m not giving anything away by revealing that Nectar, unsurprisingly, turns out to have been a shortsighted combat enhancement for the soldiers of the future. For today’s gamers, it’s a novel tool in this first-person shooter that causes bad guys to glow and stand out from their surroundings, making them easier to shoot. It also becomes a novel weapon for the South American rebels, who throw Nectar grenades that cause future-troops to overdose.

That dark side of the mercs’ Nectar habit makes for some nice touches when you play alongside the insurgents, who can become “invisible” by pretending to be dead, because someone loopy on Nectar sees only potential threats — and no corpses. (This was also a convenient way to explain why game animators in “Haze” let all the bodies disappear after your firefights.)

“Haze” devotes more time than would most other games to the Big Questions about addiction and war. In one early cut-scene, when your character asks his sergeant if they should all be so jacked up all the time, Sarge gives a long, Hollywood-style speech: “Do you love anyone? Hate anyone? The only reason you do is a bunch of chemical compounds in your brain … you weren’t doing it for any higher purpose … you’re an ape!” Nectar is no different, Sarge says — just another psychochemical that results in a given behavior.

Not quite King Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day, to be sure, but still an order of magnitude more thoughtful than many of today’s first-person shooters. But where our designers invested in content, they scrimped on what makes video games fun: Graphics, game play, weapons, etc.

In today’s era of gaming, in which the maps of “Rainbow Six Vegas 2” are so detailed you can see individual patterns in the mortar between bricks on a wall, the levels in “Haze” are dull, flat and sparse. There are a few mildly interesting weapons, but no real need to ever deviate from your standard-issue assault rifle. Designers even messed up a standard technique for creating realism in first-person movement: As you walk, the screen shakes to an annoying degree, instead of just jostling a little bit to suggest footsteps. Even so, your weapon is as steady as the British pound, and you don’t even need to lie down or hold your breath to use a rifle scope.

Without the occasional diversions provided by the cut-scenes in single-player mode, online play sacrifices the food-for-thought-McNuggets and forces you to focus on the game play and the maps, which quickly grows wearisome. As with the single-player, the online mode often focuses on Nectar — stealing it, protecting it, abusing it — but in baffling new game varieties that I struggled to figure out. Even the standard team-deathmatch games were underwhelming, staged on enormous, low-detail maps in which you spent most of the time running to find bad guys.

Ultimately, “Haze” would’ve been a revolutionary first-person shooter if it had come out in 2001, but it does not stack up well against its competition from the past few years. For players who’ll forgive the clumsy game play on behalf of the deep sci-fi elements of the story line, “Haze” could be the antidote for a rainy weekend. But as insidious as Nectar is, there’s no danger of getting hooked.