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Gameplay
As a Mantel agent, Nectar gives you a huge advantage over the enemy. It lessens damage, speeds you up and highlights all enemy combatants so that you can see them clearly, even through the jungle. This makes the Mantel section of the game one of staying back and sniping enemies from a distance rather than rushing into a frenzied close-quarters attack.Nectar also gives you a warning should the enemies toss a grenade, so you never really feel in danger. While this serves to demonstrate the feeling of invulnerability that Nectar is supposed to give soldiers, it makes for a fairly lacklustre gaming experience.
You only have a number of shots of Nectar available to you, and while these recharge slowly it is possible to run out of Nectar in the heat of battle. No problem, though, because it's possible to cadge a few extra shots of Nectar from your teammates, meaning that you're never really short of Nectar while your teammates are still alive.
The only possible danger posed by Nectar is that for each kill you make you get a small boost to your Nectar level. Do this too many times, though, or inject too much Nectar too quickly and you'll overdose. This will send you into a killing frenzy, called "the haze" (did you see what they did there?), where you'll shoot indiscriminately at everything around you, including your teammates.
Speaking of your teammates, they're not really people you'd want to hang around with after work. Think of the archetypal American football jock with two brains hanging between his legs and an empty skull and you'd be fairly close to the mark. They throw around comments that would make even the mercenaries of Army of Two cringe with embarrassment. They also have a very limited range of phrases to use in battle, so it quickly gets annoying hearing the same thing every ten seconds.
Given that Mantel soldiers are almost unstoppable with the help of Nectar, you'd think that fighting against them as a rebel would be virtually impossible. Strangely it’s not. When you play as a Mantel soldier it takes a barrage of bullets or an explosion in the face to take you down. Once you leave Mantel, however, your former colleagues are suddenly weakened and it's possible to take them out with just a bullet or two – it's almost as though they stop using Nectar once you've jumped ship.
As a rebel, you don't have the benefit of Nectar highlighting your enemies so battles are more close-quarter, but you still have a few tricks up your sleeve. You can take the Nectar from a fallen enemy, strap it to a grenade and toss the grenade into a group of soldiers, for example. The cloud of Nectar gas formed overdoses the soldiers and sends them into a frenzy, and they end up killing each other.
As part of Nectar stops soldiers from properly seeing what they do, it also causes Mantel soldiers to ignore dead people, something that comes in handy when you're a rebel soldier. If you find yourself close to death, you can drop to the ground and play dead until you're feeling better then jump up and carry on the fight.
If you're in a party, you'll have to keep an eye on your teammates as well as the enemy though. AI is rather flawed and it's not uncommon to have a teammate wander in front of you as you are firing. Annoyingly, when you're playing as a Mantel soldier, your teammates will often overdose themselves, meaning that you have dodge friendly fire as well as enemy fire.
There are only a few weapons available in Haze, and you're only allowed to every carry two at a time. Each side has its own range of weapons which include the standard assault rifle, pistol and sniper rifle. Rebel forces also have a minigun and flamethrower. If you're caught in the flames, you'll need to shake the PS3 controller to put the flames out, but this feels more like a gimmick to utilise the SixAxis function of the controller rather than adding any value to the game.
There are some control problems with the game too, most notably when controlling vehicles. For some reason, Free Radical decided to use the shoulder buttons for accelerating and braking rather than the triggers, which means that you're either going flat out or you're not, with nothing in between. This makes vehicles rather difficult to control, especially given that most of the time you'll be travelling along rough, bouncy terrain. Thankfully, if you total your vehicle, you'll magically find a new one hiding round the corner.
The one thing that really lets down the vehicles is their sound effects, particularly that of the quad bike. Whoever chose this sound effect is obviously a fan of the Crazy Frog. I'll say no more.
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