Haze Notes

Mention must be made of the 8 minute install of 5gb and 66mb patch download before you can play the game.
The waiting for you to press x at the bit where it tells you not to switch off the console while it's saving is annoying, as is the message that the game can't connect to demonware every time it starts, which takes about 20 seconds to come up. If we wanted to play online, then maybe we would choose that option. Otherwise you are just wasting time when people want to play.
You know that rule of ergonomic interface design that suggests putting the most used option on the most used button for speed and ease. Well when you want to start the single player game where you left off they ignore this at a crucial moment, sure pressing x for the most part will get you back to where you left off, but at the last second they make you have to move a menu slider, when it could so easily have been perfect, never mind.

Choose hard difficulty.
It's 2023 and for Shane carpenter this is a world that needs making right.
We meet up with our squad who are generic grunts. Some mention of a dictator who skins people for fun. We see our squad all get a hit of something at once as if it's dosing time for the lab rats.
We get control and we are on a hovering aircraft carrier base ship.
The first objective is to meet your squad who have wandered a little way long the deck.
You watch a cut scene, in engine, where a few planes fly overhead. There seems to be something good about this as the soldiers are all cheering. A rocket zeros in and shoots down one of the planes which is not so good. A tannoy voice says that our current mission is scrubbed and we have to go to the crash site.
We see the sargeant stopping a soldier coming on the mission who has not been taking his meds.
A long ride to the crash site is filled with banter from the squad, mostly to show they are assholes it seems.
There is a short tutorial on nectar and how to administer it, you basically hold L2 as a bar creeps up on the left lower corner of the screen. This allows you to see enemies as glowing bright light sources, essentially lights them up like christmas trees. Which is just as well as they are well camouflaged otherwise.
Clicking the right stick zooms in, and clicking the left crouches.
R1 shoots, R2 grenades
Circle changes weapons
X jumps
R2 melee attacks
Triangle reloads
You have a very halo like health bar that creeps back up when you are not under fire on the right lower corner of the screen.
We find out that the planes were filled with nectar, and the commanders seem very keen to get it back.
When land we are in a jungle environment, which looks ok but I have seen a lot better.
Combat seems a bit stilted at first. I find it hard to kill the enemies, they seem to take an awful lot of damage before falling.
We progress through a glade and then down a narrow path. We come out into a large cliff area and see bombers blowing the area up ahead apart.
We descend down the cliff side and engage more enemy soldiers.
We find a rebel camp which had been bombed to hell.
Nectar disruption flashes up on the screen quickly and the colour vanishes from the landscape.
We meet up with the commander again and he tells us to move on, there is some mention of something screaming, which I didn't hear, and the commander tells us it was just an animal.
Now we come to the crash site and more enemy soldiers.
Clearing out the crash site we are ordered to check on the pilots condition.
He is lying on his back near the cockpit, we ask if he is ok and he ask us if we can see him.
He sounds like he is dying but does not appear visibly injured.
He starts rambling about being a boxer before he signed up and dies. The enemy start a counter attack and start coming in from either side and dropping in on lines from helicopters.
Finishing off all the attackers sees us being extracted by vtol.
Again a ride in the vtol is full of fun and comedy. The squad are even more hyper and brain dead. Our character asks the commander about the pilot and is told that he didn't see him.
As we return to the flying carrier there is some damage, the commanders tells us it looks like someone has been throwing grenades on the deck.
Mission 2
We are on our way to another mission riding in the vtol when a message comes in the Skin Coat has been located, all available troops are sent to attack his position. We land and see skin coat getting away on a vehicle.
We fight a few rearguard soldiers and then are told to get into our buggy.
The controls are fairly basic steer left and right and accelerate / decelerate with R1 and R2. There is a boost with X.
We drive out of a quarry and then down to a copper plant. There is some resistance at the gates. We have to open the gates, we are told to follow a wire, but don't have to the switch is in a hut and is fairly obvious.
We drive past some more soldiers and the ai doing the shooting from the turret is a bad shot.
Then we have to drive through an area which has been mined, basically full tilt along narrow dirt tracks with explosions going off all around us.
we follow this track for a while and it is interrupted with soldiers which we can either stop and fight or just drive on past. We come to an area where we are ambushed in a barn like building and have to get out to pull a lever to open a gate.
when we reach to copper plant we find the commander arrving just as we do. He runs over an enemy soldier and is rather rude to him.
We now have to storm the plant and locate skin coat.
We walk into the plant and the commander seems to know where he is going, he tells us he was here a few weeks ago but only found empty hands. Which seems to be his name for civilians.
He tells us that empty hands are only a step away from picking up a gun. Looks like he shot them all.
We walk into a room and the weird glitching starts up, this time in the black and white we can see that there are piles of corpses lying around everywhere. The administering sound kicks in and the bodies vanish. Looks like the nectar prevents us from seeing the world as it really is.
The enemies turn up and we start fighting through the copper plant.
There is a large area with an upper and lower floor, the upper floor consists of about four rooms with a long connecting corridor, we basically have to clear out the whole floor before we find the lever to open a door and get the checkpoint. I was saying if I find myself back about forty enemies again after dying I am switching this off. Not a good selling point this early in the game.
So shit checkpoints a few times so far.
We fight our way from the level to the control room to find another level and we open a door back near where we came in.
Going back through the level there are more soldiers to kill. So add backtracking to the sins.
When you get to the new door, you go through a corridor and into a large area with three enemies then down some stairs, the stairs are mined and are blowing, so you have to run. At the bottom of the stairs you come across a firefight, as you join it you are overloaded with nectar. This sees you unable to control your view for a few seconds then unable to control your firing. The mantel troopers also lose their coherence and look like enemies. This calms down a bit after a while, but it seems I have shot my squad in the chaos.
We come across flamethrower wielding enemies.
When I kill one we can pick up the flamethrower and use it. It seems ok, you have to shake the sixaxis to put out the flames when you are on fire.
The shaking seems a bit unreliable though.
The flamethrower has a set range, by pitting you against the enemy with the same weapon you basically have to set each other on fire to progress, which is just silly.
A large two floor area with many enemies has only one checkpoint, I am sensing a theme here.
We come out onto the roof of the copper plant and find a vtol in trouble from aa guns.
We have to take out the aa.
We are running around catwalks in a huge smelting pot area, where shooting a laptop seems to disable the guns.
We now have to follow the pots to skin coat.
there are more and more nectar disturbances which make the screen blurry black and white and remove your ability to use the sights. Damn annoying in other words.
We follow the pots to a point where we have to pull a lever to re-direct them, then move on into some tunnels.
We see skin coat getting onto a moving platform.
We have to go along to the other end underneath it and use a lever to bring it back. Then we climb up onto it and use it to go where skin coat went. Enemies attack all the time we are using it.
We get into the next room and find skin coat.
He seems a normal enough old man. He gives us a speech essentially saying that he is a victim of propaganda and never committed any of the atrocities Mantel has credited him with.
He asks us if we are on the right side in this war. Duvall comes in with his goons and grabs skin coat. He bundles him into an elevator and we take the adjacent one. We have too watch as Duvall cuts off one of skin coats fingers quoting and eye for and eye.
We get back to the vtol and Duvall is about to cut off both of skin coats hands. Our character pulls a gun Skin coat siezes the moment and kicks Duvall over. There is a struggle, some fire inside the cabin and the vtol starts to lurch and goes down hard.
Mission 3
We awake to find the vtol burned out and no sign of the others. We are alone, the computer voice of our suit is damaged and goes offline. We start hearing voices and seeing things.
We can hear comm chatter which suggests that we are now being hunted by Mantel as a code Haze.
A rebel appears and we follow him to safety from the hunting Mantell troops.
We go down into a tunnel system and follow some more before collapsing and being carried to a village. We withdraw from Nectar and skin coat helps us, or Merino which is his real name.
Merino takes us on a walk through his village until we get to a church. Duvall burst out and spouts his usual apes and carnivore crap. He gets away in a car and we are left with the other two goons. We are taught how to steal a weapon. We simply go up to the enemy and melee them, then press square to grab their gun, we have to do this two both goons. Merino gives as another speech. Which suggests that Mantell sent in the troops to prevent ethnic cleansing, which is a lie. He asks carpenter who now thinks of himself as a traitor to join his side. Which we do. As we can clearly see that everything at Mantell is a lie held together by a drug.
Our first mission with the rebels is to investigate a signal coming from the beach.
We take a helicopter ride to a camp and then take a quad bike to the beach.
Once on the beach we come to a blockade. Mantell troops land by vtol.
we have to get to their mortar and use it to blow up the blockade.
We are told about playing dead, since nectar hides the horrors of war from Mantell troops then they don't see the dead. WHich means that if we play dead then they can't see us.
We are told about scavenging ammo from dead troops and also making nectar grenades out of grenades and nectar administrators from dead Mantell troops.
We are shown how nectar grenades make the mantell troops attack each other.
I notice that the tutorials are unskippable and the checkpoints huge, so you end up seeing them loads of times which gets irritating.
We come to a gate and have to enter an old castle type structure to find the lever to open the gate.
Once through the gate we encounter a minefield. The mines must be approached until they trigger and then backed away from as they explode.
We have to continue to the beached container ship. Mantel vtols drop mantell buggies which pursue us across the beach. As we get to the container ship though they break off. As if they suddenly can't see us anymore. Which suggests there is something here that Mantell is hiding even from it's own.
We enter deeper into the ship and find Teir, who we met at the start, possibly he was the one that Duvall wouldn't let come with us because he hadn't been taking enough nectar. He shows us a container full of bodies, which apparently are the ones that nectar has killed stone dead. He is unsure if nectar will kill all the soldiers taking it. He tells us that Mantell are only here because they are trying to sieze control of the area as it's the only place that the plant nectar is extracted from grows. They want to control the supply totally to prevent them having to share pofits with anyone. It's all about the porfit margin. Tier is sniped as he talks.
We now have to escape the ship which is filling with Mantel troops.
We have to go an extremely convouluted route to escape the ship, especially obvious since it only took less than a minute to get into it. We basically cover every inch of the ship and escape from a hole in the prow. We have to go to a hotel across the beach for extraction, which seems silly since the beach is nice and flat for a helicopter to land on.
Mention must be made of tripod guns that are found in this area.
We make our way through the cave and out onto the beach, where we have some wide open area fun with mantel troopers coming in by dropship.
We get to the bottom of the hill leading up to the hotel and a dropship attacks us. we have to run up to the hotel, where we fight some troops in the pool area. We enter the lobby of the hotel and are told to go to another part of the hotel for pick up.
There are some better spaced checkpoints here, which is all the more dismaying when another doozy pops up sending you all the way back out of the hotel if you are killed inside it.
Once you find you way out of the hotel lobby you have to make your way to the roof of the apartment building. Which is essentially a spiral staircase of corridors with apartments leading off, once or twice you have to detour through blown apart apartments to avoid debris blocking the way. Once onto the roof the dropship and troops make things fun, shit checkpoint here again.
When you get to the desired spot Merino comes and picks you up in his helicopter, why he couldn't have done this earlier I'll never know. Oh yes there is no real story beyond the premise and they are trying to pad out the levels.
Mission 4
In the helicopter there is more mumbling about mantell trooper atrocities and the dropship has to be taken out with a chain gun.
We are about to go to the observatory, which seems to be important for some reason. The radio tells us that the village is under attack and we go back to save it.
We have an on rails shooting section similar to GRAW. Then we land and have to destroy some artillery which is pounding the village.
The three guns are close to each other and once the defending troops are downed it's an easy matter to shoot up the innards of the guns and blow them up. We have to make our way back to the village now.
Inside the village we have to fight some troops until we make our way to a square where a tank is making life hard.
This tank is taking a hell of a pounding to kill. Odd since when we were driving it earlier in the game machine gun fire could wreck it in seconds.
The rocket launcher took some finding, but even it needs a few hits. Well about 8 hits later it finally dies, if that was their idea of a boss battle.
We now have to rendevous with Merino at the church, again.
More fighting through the cookie cutter village.
What is the point of the playing dead feature. Sure the nectar thing is clever, in that it's using the drugs ability to prevent the men from seeing the atrocities of war against them. But when you use it the troopers just stand around where you were and do nothing, so when you stand back up again you are in just as much dire straights as before. Why can't you shoot from the floor and at least have an advantage.
I eventually realise that the way to Merino is less complicated than I thought and I don't have to muck about with close quarters combat with the shotgun troops infesting the housing. Merino tells us that they have to hold the courtyard in front of the church and gives us some mines to plant at the doors into the courtyard. There is also an emplaced gun.
We hold back the troops until the helicopter arrives and as it comes in to pick us up our old pal Duvall turns up in a dropship and blows up our helicopter. We now have to take out Duvall.
A few rockets and some shooting with the fixed gun bring down duvall pretty easily, well compared to the darn tank earlier.
Now with no easy way up to to observatory we have to walk. We follow Merino to a missile launcher. A pretty big missile launcher, looks like a nuke. Something is wrong with it's axle and it will have to move slowly.
We are to escort it to a place where we can use it to assault the mantel carrier.
Only thing is if we go to far ahead we are told to go back and stay with the missile.
We start to cross the bridge and a dropship mines it. We have to clear the mines by setting them off basically. Shooting a mine doesn't set it off but walking near it does?
The drop ship also shoots at you from above. Soldiers hide behind cover spots on the bridge.
The missile carrier waits for us to get rid of most of the mines then just starts moving with a few still in the way without warning?
We now have to rocket the dropship to proceed.
I can't belive this, i fell off the bridge andd didn't die, swam under it and up behind the enemy. By the time i get there all the a.i. fighters on both sides have vanished. I have to destroy a dropship pod which is just sitting there undefended to progress.
We now have to blow up the road bridge to prevent Mantel troops chasing us.
It is common to throw a grenade round a corner and have it explode, then when you go round that corner to find some troops standing facing a wall doing nothing, a grenade has just exploded nearby and they have not been activated by it's explosion, you walking into their radius on the other hand sends them running at you shooting.
We have to go into the towers that support the bridge and then into the gantries under it. Where we have to push big glowing blue buttons to arm the bombs which are already planted.
Two buttons later we are told to run and get back to Merino. He tells us that we have to go to the observatory. Merino tells us that his hand hurts.
we now have to advance up the mountain path and are given a vehicle, the rebel truck.
This is actually quite fun, lots of tanks and soldiers behind barricades and driving through proper race track like levels. We come to a heavily mined trap with a garrison of mantel troops, breaking through gets us a mantel buggy to ride. We drive along steep cliff edged drops with a mortar gunning for us. There is a jump with a bridge and again we see the no fun design at work. I fumble the jump and land half on the edge. Not even the boost can get the buggy off the edge, effectively sticking it to the bridge, requiring suicide to get any more progress.
Getting past the bridge leads us up into a village where mantel has an ambush planned.
Through the ambush we reach the crest of the mountain and get out of the vehicles and enter a mining tunnel system.
The mining tunnel is a pain in the ass, you basically have about fifteen mounted guns to fight, no checkpoints, so you really get to examine what a poor design they have here as you repeat the same boring section many times after getting gunned down by the rapid firing machine guns that seem to have poor hit detection. I swear my gun sight was on them when i emptied that clip guv.
Once you find a ladder you come out of the mine and can see the observatory in the distance.
There is a visitors centre!! We have to proceed through it. Heavy mantel troops at the doors.
The visitor centre has a large cylindrical room with balconies around the inside. There is a large globe like metal sculpture in the middle of the cylinder.
We have to fight our way to the bottom of the cylinder only to find that we have to go all the way back up to find fusebox you shoot to open the doors at the bottom.
we now have to go up a hill avoiding sniper fire from the cable car station which will get us over to the observatory.
Inside the cable car station we have to fight our way up three stories then out onto gantries where a drop ship is making things hard by breaking the gantry to the cable car.
I run at the drop ship the first time and it rockets me, second time i hide back in the tower and look about for a clue to the strategy, while i am doing this Merino talks to us and Shane tells him that he will shoot over the radar tower to make a bridge. While I start working out how to do this the drophip is shooting at me and it does it for me. Vanishing at the same time. All I now have to do is walk along the gantry and across the new bridge.
The cable car crossing is interrupted by a dropship putting some soldiers on your roof and then another cable car filled with troops passing by.
As we get across to the next station there is a fight going on with our troops and mantel troops. We find a quad bike outside the station. Our objective is to get to the observatory.
The observatory is heavily guarded, eventually i find my way in and we find a huge machine which it seems is something to do with the nectar supply?
There are two circut boxes to shoot which then opens a panel revealing four switches, press these and the distribution control for all mantel troops stops working, and none of them get nectar.
We are told to get out for extraction, we must stop aa guns so the helicopter can get in.
As we leave we see mantel troops coming to terms with their actions under nectar and shooting themselves.
When we get outside we have to disable the aa guns, which are manned by the mantel elite troops who were not under the influence of nectar.
There are around five anti aircraft guns around the observatory and we have to go up to each heavily defended gun and kill the operator.
The helicopter arrives and we get in, there is a short ride and we meet up with Merino in a clearing.
He gives a speech to rouse the rabble for the final assault.
We are now going to attack the mantel landcarrier, which I thought previously was a flying platform, but it's like an aircraft carrier that travels on land. we are now riding in a vehicle firing a chaingun. We have to shoot off four rocket turrets, then four valves on the undeside of the carrier at each side, the back doors then fall open. We then drive up inside the carrier and get out of the vehicle.
We are trying to disable the defences so that Marino can fire the rocket we got into position earlier.
Inside the land carrier there are two stairs to take at either side, both seem to lead to dead ends. Many troops are around, but they seem much less able to fight than earlier.
I can't work out where to go next???
I eventually need a walkthrough to find it, the only place i didn't look, so two three dead ends and one with a door, not the best. I make my way to the control room and open the hangar door. there is a tank but we can just run past it pressing a switch to get into the next area. A dropship makes life hard, but there is a rocket launcher nearby which makes short work of it.
We progress further along the carrier, Merino tells us to watch out for special forces.
We come to a room with four servers that must be hacked to turn off the defense grid. We have to defend our hacker while he works.
Special forces attack while he does.
This is a bugger to complete, the spec ops troops are accurate and fast. Special mention must go to the stupidity of the ally a.i. who do their best to get into your line of fire, especially when I use rockets, killing me and them at the same time.
Eventually I manage to kill all the guards, using the play dead feature, which I thought was only meant to work on the nectared up troops.
We have to fight our way to an elevator control and then we use the elevator to get up on the deck.
On the deck we have two drop ships to destroy, there are two handy rocket launching entrenched guns to use.
Once done we get told to stop the carrier moving so that Merino's missile can hit it. We have to get to the movement control room and stop the driver.
When we reach the control room, by climbing a crashed dropship we find Duvall, who is as much of an asshole as usual. We have to kill him then get a cut scene of him taking an age to die and worrying what his mother will think of him.
Merino tells us that the missile is inbound.
We have to meet his helicopter on the deck, as it takes off the missile hits the carrier.
Merino tells us that he is going to use nectar to make his country a better place.
Shane expresses doubts and Merino starts spouting stuff about mantel just being animals.
Looks like someone read animal farm.
Wow that was as a below average first person shooter.
No trophies to even make it worthwhile playing.