Waiting for Haze

Haze is a new first-person shooter for the PS3, coming from British developers Free Radical, which was due to be out a few weeks ago. Despite having never played any of FR’s previous games (unless you count the glorious Goldeneye), I’ve always had high hopes for it – high enough that I finally bought a PS3 recently, with its release date in mind – and guess what? It turns out that its been delayed, and I’m not going to be able to buy it, play it or rub the box between my thighs until after Christmas.

Disaster.

So whereas I was originally intending on playing it through and writing up some kind of review, I’m now going to ramble on about why I’m interested in it in the first place.

It’s rare that I anticipate a game’s release as much as I currently am doing with Haze – or at least, in the same way. It’s not like I’m pining over a sequel to an established series, like I am with say, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gran Turismo 5. The part of me that is interested in Haze is the part of me that wants to see more games go against the grain of the industry at large, and express interesting ideas in a unique way.

…Which might seem like an odd thing to say, because if you were to sum it up in a few words – the wrong ones, of course – Haze can end up sounding really generic and boring. It is, after all, an FPS game set in a futuristic war, where macho male marine soldiers run around and shoot people. If I didn’t know anything more about the game, I’d no doubt fob it off as yet another piece of unimaginative tosh that I’m going to love to ignore, but Haze promises to have more going on. It’s like an onion – to borrow an analogy from Shrek – where the typical shooty-shooty marine setup is only its outermost layer. What’s more is that in this particular case, the mainstream-friendly veneer is integral to the tasty stuff underneath.

The marketing blurb tells us that the game is set in a fictional near-future of 2048, in which war has become predictably rife. A private military company known as Mantel have risen up to the challenge of saving the day, fighting against an apparently horrible, evil army of South American rebels trying to overthrow the government. The player takes control of Shane Carpenter – a brave and handsome white man in the Mantel army – whose new job it is to fly out to the jungle and shoot lots of other men, who are of course, much less brave, handsome and white. Shane and the player begin the game with the convenient assumption that they are doing The Right Thing.

To help soldiers like Shane in their efforts, Mantel have developed what they call a “performance-enhancement medication” called Nectar, which is designed to give them the edge during combat. Injected into the back of soldiers’ necks during battle, it works in the game as a kind of powerup that among other things, helps us spot our enemies easier, aim more accurately, be aware of imminent danger, and perform lethal melee attacks up close.

So we have lots of men, war, guns and powerups. So far, so typical for videogames. Bear with me, and hold onto that precious onion analogy…

During the three days in which the story takes place, it becomes apparent that the Mantel corporation maybe aren’t the noble saviours of freedom they claim to be. Indeed, when their super-macho advertisements are urging the public to join them and “Fight the Good Fight!”, there’s a clear streak of satire that invites comparison with the film adaptation of Starship Troopers.

Shane is a good guy, and soon enough he begins to question whether or not he’s fighting on the right side, or for the right reasons. He realises that the war he’s fighting is all fucked up, and actually ends up switching sides part-way through the story, to join the Rebels in a fight against Mantel.

When Shane defects, and is no longer under the influence of Nectar, everything seems to change. We see that for all of the game up until now, Nectar has had the rather sinister effect of filtering our perception of what’s going on. Without it, the previously sunny and idyllic South American jungle now looks colder, and bleak. The game’s gung-ho rock music changes to a more sombre orchestral score. It used to be that when we killed enemies, Nectar would remove them from our vision to help us focus on other targets; but now the corpses stay in plain sight. Whereas the rebels always seemed to go down quickly and quietly before, now the soldiers on both sides scream and writhe in pain as they are wounded and killed; leaking blood and dying longer, more agonised deaths.

As the scattered corpses of soldiers, rebels, and civilians re-appear, the Haze of the game’s title begins to fade away. Nectar was designed to make Mantel soldiers the perfect soldiers – focused and efficient in combat; dehumanised, desensitised, and even addicted to the killing – and it’s no coincidence that it does this by transforming the aesthetics of war into those of a videogame.

Haze, it seems, has something on its mind, and an itch it wants to scratch. While I suspect that FR aren’t setting out to make any explicit statements with it, it seems they’re more than willing to ask some interesting questions. Questions to do with what some gamers are doing, when they enjoy the military fantasy of following orders and relentless killing in FPS games. Questions about what some developers are doing, when they turn immersive experiences of violence and war into a mindless entertainment cashcow. It seems like a rare admission of moral creative responsibility, in an industry that sometimes seem to thrive (and even depend) on not giving a shit about the shit it puts out. And I like that.

I have to admit: the cynic in me says that Haze isn’t likely to turn out as amazing or subversive as I want or imagine it to be. Especially given the inevitable compromise to be made in order for it to be widely accepted among typical FPS gamers, my hopes are so high that they’re probably impossible to reach. But even if it ended up a bit rough around the edges, or flawed in its execution, it will have at least tried to say something, and to be about something that actually matters – and not enough games do even that.